


I Will Be Here When You Wake

by heatherandochre



Series: the rumble, the word, the way [1]
Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Horror and Supernatural Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-01-27 05:58:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21387244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heatherandochre/pseuds/heatherandochre
Summary: The biggest reason Rook refuses to join Eden’s Gate is that Joseph Seed Hot-Crazy scaled his siblings and she’s not even sure he did it right.
Relationships: Female Deputy | Judge & Joseph Seed, Joseph Seed/Original Female Character(s)
Series: the rumble, the word, the way [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1548880
Comments: 15
Kudos: 42





	1. Isn't it Lovely?

**Author's Note:**

> I've had a lot of fun for the last three months or so being a big creepy lurker in this fandom. Then this AU held me down and forcibly baptised me in some shitty drug creek fish fuck in, so here we are with the first of three mostly developed stories. 
> 
> So: author chooses not to warn side note, this is more than a little bit about misogyny. Not from the characters to each other but about the hard process of living with what you're given. If there is a strong need for any particular warning about that tell me and I'll pop it in. I'm here to right safe weird exploratory fiction and safe communities are made through communication.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hello, welcome home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had a lot of fun for the last three months or so being a big creepy lurker in this fandom. Then this AU held me down and forcibly baptised me in some shitty drug creek fish fuck in, so here we are with the first of three mostly developed stories. So: author chooses not to warn side note, this is more than a little bit about misogyny. Not from the characters to each other but about the hard process of living with what you're given. If there is a strong need for any particular warning about that tell me and I'll pop it in. I'm here to right safe weird exploratory fiction and safe communities are made through communication.

* * *

It’s blue-green the thirtieth day of her new job and Temperance “Rook” O’Hare hasn’t slept the night through in two weeks. Blue-green is the colour of the sky through the thick pelt of leaves that make Montana a cross between a beautiful place to get lost in and beautiful place to get shot in. You can’t always see who can see you. Driving down empty roads it doesn’t exactly occur to her to be bothered, but then the list of what would turn her head is very short. 

Classic rock out of the speakers. A leftover Jo Malone stocking stuffer to cover up the mildew smell of her piece of shit car: English Pear and fucking Freesia.The car has only one CD, a _ Best of Rock _ compilation from the nineties stretching back that got stuck in the machine four years ago. The seller had been red all over about it, but Rook honestly said she’d probably never notice. Music is nice, but she doesn’t listen to it a lot. Her breakfast is on the seat next to her, mixed rice and bean salad, low GI, all the good shit. A spoon is balanced precariously between her fingers on the wheel, other hand tapping out the tune. 

Thirty nine days since she got here, thirty since she started the job. Thirty good enough days. Thirty days in which she wasn’t the strangest thing on the block. Normal, boring days. It’s almost enough to make her believe.

Wildlife springs up along the half hour drive in. Birds and bees, other things besides. She’s not that outdoorsy, to be honest, more than enough skills to handle it but otherwise she’ll be inside with a beer thank you. She stops by a fallen log for a moment, to push it out of the way. Soft foot falls come from behind her: the sound of deer. She grins to herself and gets low to the ground, crabs walk back to her car listening to the pitter-patter of deer hooves.

She gets in her car and starts up. It’s blue-green in Montana, Hope County, and Rook feels just fine.

She’s coming out from the edge of woods. A weird dip of road that goes close to the water and a Project residence. The air gets funny for a second, she gets hot and itchy in her eyes like she’s about to cry. Her head aches, that pain resonating down to build between her shoulder blades. Out of the corner of her eye she sees a slim legged animal jump to get in front of her car. It’s grey and soft furred, there are flowers growing out of its ears and it has giant milky eyes bloated to the size of fists- 

And it’s not a deer. Just _ like _a deer-

“Shit!” She yanks to the right. 

She skids to the side throwing her salad into the footwell. The radio jars to a halt, kicks back in on a high _ ahhhhhhh _and settles skipping across the stuck CD. Rook hits the brakes and breathes with her head against the steering wheel. Calm down, calm the fuck down. She peeks over the steering wheel.

No deer. 

\--

She parks in her spot and jogs in fifteen minutes late. No one gives a shit. Not even Pratt. Nancy isn’t at her desk but she has left a _ Gone Fishing _sign.

Her first day was boring orientation and one on one time with each member of the small staff. 

Whitehorse was _ totally _ a stallion in his youth. She tells Staci this when they’re on shift together and there’s nothing to do. He spits his coffee and hisses _ watch your damn mouth _ at her but she’s right, and she makes him say _ Whitehorse is a Stallion _three times before the end of shift. He’s got big shoulders and a nice solid personality. A good man for easy times can handle well in bad ones. He asks her why a woman with a biochem degree takes a job in Montana, doesn’t ask why she danced through college and comes at her ten-month absence from a good angle. 

“Oh, I was married.” Rook smiles around it. Great legs and a nice smile, that was Dylan’s favourite thing about her. She could smile around anything.

Whitehorse looks down at the fading mark on her finger. His whole lovely faces melts into compassion. _ A good man, _ she thinks, _ and a sad one. _She gets free lunch for a week. 

Nancy can eat shit. 

She’s known Stacey the cheerleader who hated her for being a hair stronger and bustier. Too tall to be the Flyer but Rook looked better in the miniskirt and had better hair. She’s known Stacy the competitor who was in law school at the same time Rook was drinking smoothies and working on her tan, always wearing too high heels but not the good kind. She’s passed Stacy-the-competition after a shift at Paul’s Pole’s and had that Stacy look at her like she was trash even though Rook can squash a man’s head with her thighs _ and _ spend seven hours in six-inch platform heels. She’s even had Staecy the fellow husband-finder in her cute fifties-style skirt and cowl necked blouse, by the grill and high as a fucking kite on uppers because she’s been clinically depressed since grade school. Staci-with-an-i is _ interesting _ . Thirty minutes into her first day he swans over, tries to take her in, like he has the range, and says _ I’m going to call you Rook, for Rookie. _ There’s no way he knew what he was getting when she came here. He was going to swan over even if she was a brick shithouse who chewed nails for fun and try that shit. Scoots for him, though. She _ loves _ the nickname. It means no ones gonna try and hold her by her real one. So she thanks him, wide eyed and empty mouthed the way she learnt men liked early enough, and he stuttered and said _ we don’t have to- _ because, deep down, Staci wants a sister-in-arms not an ingenue who just needs his special brand of humiliation to grow. 

Such a bitch, good god he could party with any of the other Staci’s if his clearly maligned ego could take the hit, but he’s good people. He’ll grow out of that shit if they can just let him. 

(Okay, Nancy can eat shit, but she gets it. Really. Rook’s thirty-three and divorced. She was married to a banker she met when she was twenty-six and he was thirty-nine and she’s divorced. She was a gymnast, a dancer and a stripper, she still looks like she could do all of it and she’s divorced. She’s a biracial woman with keratin straight hair, big Bambi eyes, expensive lipstick _and she’s divorced._) 

There’d been a little bit of shit when she and Hudson first worked together alone. Hudson is still working through losing her partner. Rook is green and sometimes just _ too pretty _to do this job among a bunch of armed misogynists with little to respect about their uniform. She gets the feeling that Hudson is just waiting, waiting for the comment that makes Rook scared. Fear instead of Temperance’s patience. Joey Hudson has been out here ethnically dubious longer than her and she thinks that maybe, just maybe some rednecks thoughts on her tits will snap her awake. Make her into a woman she understands. She and Hudson will probably get into some shit pile of racism and misogyny together, they won’t ever like each other -Hudson has too much of the wrong kind of fire, Rook is a mostly melted Ice Bitch and she’s never liked girls who got angry instead of even- but they’d fucking stab a man for each other and that’ll do.

Rook doesn’t actually _ want _to be the kind of girl who only gets along with guys. She was in a sorority for the friends not just the parties. But her pickings are fucking slim. She could be Mary May’s girl. Maybe take her shooting, but then it’ll be about pretending they have anything but the absolute worst in common.

It’s hard to make friends.

All of her workmates are in Whitehorse’s office. They’re watching something and arguing. Because no one else has done it she starts coffee and goes to Staci’s mess of a desk and switches from the landline to his mobile. They get non-essentials like Animal Control on their personals during the day. A pack of hogs in one area can turn into a collision somewhere else right quick. She learnt that in her first week. She doesn’t touch Hudson’s desk, she does empty her pocket of all the little sugar packets she stole when she hit the diner in Missoula last week. The sugar makes coffee into sludge that you eat more than drink. Joey Hudson and Rook aren’t ever going to be friends but they can be friendly. 

Nancy’s desk is empty. Her phone is off the hook and full up with beeping lights. None of Rook’s business. 

She gets her coffee, cracks open her copy of _ The Name of the Rose _and gets ready to be an officer of the law in Hope County, Montana. Her workmates are still arguing in the office. Hudson is alternating between bloodless and bloody furious. Staci looks like he’s going to throw up. It’s Whitehorse she watches. He’s got a hard look behind that moustache. One that Rook isn’t eager to face down. She hunkers lower at the desk and keeps reading her book. 

By lunch, the day has settled into the ‘senior officers’ marching into head office to be upset and/or mulishly completing paperwork at their desks. 

At a little after one a woman slams into the bullpen. “Peaches ate a fucking wasp!”

Staci has decided that Rook might be getting above herself and has decided to haze her a little more. It won’t fucking work. “Whose Peaches?” She whispers to him.

“My _ fucking _cat,” the woman turns burning eyes on her, Rook’s seeing madness, mostly the alcoholic kind. “What are you doing with my tax dollars hiring this-”

“I understand you’re upset,” Whitehorse says at the exact time Rook realises this might be who she’ll have to stab Hudson for. “Let’s get Peaches to the vet.”

“She’s in the car!”

From a distance she hears Nancy squeal, “Is that a _ cougar? _Why is a cougar trying to eat my lunch?” 

It has been thirty-one days and Temperance is not the strangest person in Hope County.

\--

She’s standing in the back of a pick-up truck holding an illegal gun when she meets Jacob Seed for the first time.

Staci is being _ such _a brat on the ground. Smiling and cajoling her to get out of the truck bed with her new best friend Nancy the Sawed Off Shotgun and being a brat about naming illegal weapons after workmates and being a brat because he keeps grinning like she’s fucking hilarious, here in this pick-up truck with the gun they shouldn’t have.

It’s a hairpin turn. Their car is absolutely shit broken, no they can’t fix it, Joey, have you _ seen _them? Hudson knows and has sent Danny to fix it. They’ve called in and they’ve got time to stand around being assholes. 

Like a fucking portent, Jacob Seed ruins it. 

His stupid truck is black. The now familiar Eden’s Gate symbol is stickered on the side just this side of obnoxious. She’s liked a lot of the Eden’s Gate people. It’s not very hard to get her to like you, honestly, but Jacob makes Staci weird, the way John makes Mary May weird, and Rook has no use for that at all. The truck takes the turn dangerously and nearly hits them, driver barely doing more than flashing a wrist in apology before it keeps on going. 

Staci cups his hands. “Asshole!” 

The car stops. Out hops six-foot-three two hundred and something of red-headed asshole.

Weight from the hips. Military. Sure and confident, not arrogant. His type were rare in the clubs, both the country and the x-rated. The kind of military that makes it to cucumber sandwiches and tennis shoes has a bunch of numbers after the first biblical name, wives named Trish and kids who loathe them but are still going to be the next Jebediah in uniform. The other club was a little too rich for enlisted unless they were just deeply fucking stupid. Girls cost money and girls who dance, the good ones, fucking well know that. She doesn’t get ‘stupid with money’ or ‘beating Trish with his belt over dinner settings’. Jacob’s got the right kind of first name but he’s just a hair too controlled.

She’s thinking _ wolf rot. _Things that take good animals and makes them sick, strangles them still and makes the other predators cut them loose. Pure instincts driven mad, and in people made dangerous. Mad animals starve, mad men usually make you starve with them. She’s thinking of rot, here in this pickup, with the gun she shouldn’t have named, in a place they shouldn’t be.

Jacob looks at her, takes a pretty decent look, actually, probably the best Hope County has managed. Her hold on the gun is loose and wrong, her hair is wild and she’s breathing heavy from acting like a fool. He looks again, less thorough. Less wolf rot. 

Staci, to her immense embarrassment, promptly loses his shit. 

“Jacob Seed,” Staci’s voice kind of goes deep, not enough but some. “What a surprise.”

“Officers.” His eyes are on Staci but his body is angled to let her know he’s got two eyes and he’s willing to use them. “Car trouble?”

“Just a little,” she says, putting the gun down right. “Got a helping hand?”

Staci sends her a look. He’s seen her play sweet before, he thinks it’s the wrong play with someone this old and dangerous. He’s wrong. Jacob’s already got the piece of information he needed. 

She’s not scared of him.

Big, scarred, _ big _ and five foot nine professionally trim Temperance O’Hare doesn’t give a shit. Now Jacob is going to have to figure out what kind of _ not scared _she is.

Jacob looks at her. Only her, no Staci. “Sure, officer.” He shrugs. “I’ve got time.”

He’s not the right kind of man to be at any of the clubs she grew up in. He’s the right kind of man to spend evenings in her grandfather’s parlour, having drinks and making money making bodies. Rufus O’Hare taught her to fire a gun and he taught her what you do with men who look at you the way Jacob just did. You keep whatever look you had and you breathed normally. If you were out of breath, you normalised it. If you were confident you kept it going. If you were scared you got clear of danger and you called home. _ All men are predators, _ he said, _ the trick is to never let them know you could be prey. _Rook never blinks first.

There’s frisson, an itch between her shoulder blades. She’s watching him watch her. 

_ What kind of scared are you? _ She’s not. _ What kind of woman are you? _Guess.

He goes to his stupid truck. He gets his tools. 

She asks him about the church. Every ounce of etiquette training, of learning to de-escalate her parents, her grandfather’s friends, men in clubs that wanted things she didn’t, her husband who wanted a different wife, goes into making him back down. She traps him in social niceties, in politeness but skates away from familiarity. It looks like a conversation but it’s a war of attrition.

Staci goes very quiet.

After a while, Jacob finishes with their truck. He says, “If you’re this interested you should just go.” He finishes up and hands her his wrench. “Think about it.” 

“Officers.” He inclines himself a touch at her. 

The whole day is turning. Suddenly Nancy the Rifle seems stupid. Calling Joey and saying _ no it’s fixed, Jacob Seed, yes that one _ makes her feel like a child. Gross and sticky and just so _ fucking _dumb. Dumb to be out here making men like Jacob Seed take notice just because you had a fucked-up childhood and you can’t ignore danger. Because there’s a part of her head that makes her smile no matter what.

Staci doesn’t talk to her at first. He’s _pissed. _They sit neat and quiet all the way back to the office, then he spits, “Do not fuck Jacob Seed.”

“Staci Pratt,” she says full sweetness, to keep the bile rocking in her gut down. “Just what kind of a mind have you got in there?” She drops the sweetness. She smiles. “If I wanted to feed myself to a wild animal I’d just go straight to Peaches.” 

\--

Lately Rook has been having dreams about deer. 

Every morning she wakes up, does yoga, thinks about deer. Makes herself a sandwich for breakfast with barely cooked meat and salad, chewing through the blood, thinks about deer. They've been making her hungry and wild. Like there's a hunt on. Usually she's a vegetarian. There are no more carcasses running across the road on the way to work. Blue-green days in a county this close to both the sky and the river, but no more deer on her way to work. A runaway snake the size of a small child parked in the elementary school's excuse for a playground, but no more deer. A fire bomb threat courtesy of one Charlamagne Boshaw, the only person competing with Temperance O'Hare for stupidest name, but no more deer on the road. 

People are going missing. 

It's a 'Not for Newbie' case. A 'you're barely out of LEO diapers case'. It's a 'Staci Pratt is seven years younger than you but has seniority' case. Which is fine, but people are going missing. She can _ feel _it, right down in the marrow, that something is coming. And whatever it is is making her really fucking hungry.

So when she meets Faith she is mostly thinking about deer. 

Temperance could never manage ‘delicate’.When the list of ‘appropriate’ qualifiers for demure, respectable women came round she picked _ sweet, charming and active. _ Delicate is a foreign country. Formerly Rachel, currently Faith has _ delicate _ screaming from every pore. Fragile. Misunderstood. Whitehorse has a spot soft as mud for her and her white dresses. Hudson and Nancy have this wide-eyed thing going on, half terror and half suspicion. The kind of thing that makes Rook speechless with anger. Even Staci is kind of fucking stupid about her, like being nineteen and a siren will stop her from doing whatever ugly thing is inside her. Faith is a few thousand years of _ womanly weakness _and deception wrapped up in a pretty blonde white girl in a pretty lacy dress, with a dash of something truly gruesome on top. 

Rook takes one look at Faith and thinks, _ that’s bait. _

And the bait, it turns out, is for her.

It’s for the member of her faithful that has fallen off the wagon, most accurately, but it was Rooks collar and Rooks mistake making fun of Jacob Seed on the side of the road for his silver undercut, so she can pay her flesh price in Faith Seed. She’s a goddamn professional. She runs them all through the process with a service-worker smile and not a lick of given ground. Faith plays it well, she gets sweet. She gentles the nearly sobbing man with her fingertips. Tell him he’s going to see someone named John and it’ll all be fine. That he’s lucky it was _ Rook _who Jacob likes, what the fuck, that found him. She’s so gentle, and so sweet, and so reassuring that it’s really unfair that Rook is thinking about dislocating her jaw. 

Faith tells the sobbing man that he’ll be spending time in Holland Valley and without missing a beat turns and asks, “Would you have dinner with us? I have to escort this one,” she smiles at the man, “to John and I _ know _ that we’d all love to get to know you better. All the members of our community think well of you. It can be hard,” here her mouth changes, too subtle for most to catch, “in such a small community. Especially as an outsider. We know all about that.” The words are a little wrong. Maybe not hers. God, Staci will _ lose _it if Jacob likes her that much.

Rook is still in full service mode. Her head tilts, her smile widens, her thin French boarding accent spills out. “That would be inappropriate, Miss Seed, but thank you for thinking of it. Awfully kind.” 

“You should join us for dinner,” Faith touches her jaw, drags her finger along it like she can’t not. “We could use you, Deputy.”

Temperance has Chastity, Kindness, Charity and Diligence for sisters. She doesn’t need Faith. 

“Use me? Kinda thought it was a ‘rise up together’ kinda church. Might just have to have another look, if we’re going on about using.” Rook tucks her teeth back, makes herself back down from this ball of gentle, beautiful total _ batshit. _“You have a nice day, ma’am.”

Faith tilts her head, that slimy thing Rook doesn’t think she was meant to see flashing forward. “I think you know what I meant, Ms O’Hare.” Her voice pitches quiet. 

Later, when she's got a better handle on Faith Seed, she'll realise it's her confusion that saves her. Faith likes confusion, she likes uncertainty, her whole brand of mania is built on it. For a moment Rook has no idea why this woman is using her last name.

Faith leans back. She plays sweet. Rook almost hates her for it. “Jacob said you were interested. Take a leap, and come see, Deputy.” 

Not on Rook’s life.

\--

It is at this point people stop saying _ Project _ and start saying _ Cult. _

It has been eleven months and Temperance O’Hare isn’t the strangest thing in Hope County. 

\--

In the summer, a murder.

Rook has officially reached 'knows enough to be allowed to fuck up' status, so she climbs into Hudson's car with her and goes out to the crime scene. Staci has been out since before dawn. 

A hiker, a bear, a knife. Not in that order. The body is mangled in water. Smeared on rocks. The scene goes up from the Henbane up into the trees marking out a trail of terror. Hudson and Rook start there. Hudson has fifty markers, Rook has one and a sticky note telling her to _ Be careful : ) _. The woman’s pack is slashed open, torn from a shoulder by her assailant. The contents kick and tumble towards the horrid conclusion. A flask. A pair of underwear. Hudson drops markers where she thinks they go and Rook is hit with the sudden weight of their occupation. She has no idea if Hudson knows what she’s doing. What if she’s wrong? Who gets punished if they’re wrong?

“Down to the river, Rook.” Hudson murmurs from her crouch. Marker 13: a well thumbed copy of Jane Eyre. “Don’t worry. We’ve got you.”

Rook blinks dry eyes. Licks dry lips.

Is she meant to be scared? This is her first dead body but it’s not her first time walking along to the scent of danger. The girl, blonde and little, was in her early twenties. She wasn’t raped, just harmed. She’s a dead body. Just gone. Rook can’t worry for dead things. 

She goes to the river and finds the girls torn fingers along the way. Rook’s lonely marker: 15.

Staci is in the water. His notebook is out and he looks sick to his bones. Rook stands on the rivers edge and listens to him talk to himself. Not the words just the worn down cadence. “Let us take over.”

Staci stabs his page. “No.”

“Staci-”

“_Deputy. _” Staci snarls. “No.”

Rook throws her hands up and gets Joey.

Joey Hudson has thirty seconds for Staci’s drama. Then she starts yelling. “Get out of the fucking water.” Staci jerks into compliance sliding out of the water like he hates them for it. Joey grabs his face, his sad hang-dog eyes and makes him look at her. “You fail when you give up. You give up when you get hungry and make mistakes. You make _ mistakes _because you’ve been out here since dawn and didn’t sleep much before that. You were playing COD with my cousin, dipshit, I know.” Staci’s face jerks into a smile. Joey relents. “You solve this by letting us do the grunt work. Get a few hours in Staci.”

Staci does his handover. He gives her his notebook and his rundown. Tells them that Peggies have been seen nearby and that the girl was visiting kin up by the Project. He’s all of twenty-six and he looks it. When he’s finished and Joey’s got it all covered he walks over to her. 

Rook puts on her winning-est smile.

Staci sighs. He throws his sweaty gross arms around her and hugs her tightly. Staci smells like rotting meat and river water. Rook smells like her Byredo hair mist and expensive body lotion. He hugs her even tighter for a moment, releasing all of his anger and terror into her with out meaning to -that’s what being stupid together on sideroads, in front of _ Jacob Seed _ gets you, trust and consequences- before he picks up his sense of masculinity again and walks on. Rook holds it for a moment, she loves him, and lets it all out again. She smiles, this one for Hudson, who looks happy with her for once. 

Rook keeps smiling. It won’t last. It never lasts.

\--

It is still blue-green three weeks later when the leads dry up and Staci stops talking.

She is alone today for reasons that seemed very small town to her. No one’s called in, she’s counting blessings and being lazy besides. Nancy _ did _ tell her she was expecting a representative from the Project while Rook was the only one on duty. Rook smiled through the whole conversation and elected to avoid the man at all costs. Eden’s Gate is bearing down on them over this. Whether to close the case or to try harder is not clear. Staci won’t talk. She looks out and lo and behold there’s a lawyer by dispatch with a neat silver phone in hand. He’s handsome in the same overawed way people call her pretty. Tattooed, scarred, but still very conventional. Manicured and confident, he’d know the scent on her body from experience. Her brain tells her _ high roller with a dangerous edge, risky play. _ She catalogues him then moves on.

The lawyer tries to catch her out but she dodges like a motherfucker. 

_ Jane Eyre _ is on her desk to be read. It’s been on her _ to read _for awhile now. She makes Staci his coffee instead and clears his desk a little. He has notes written in cramped script across many pages of notebooks and several loose sheets of paper. She scans them quickly and decides to order them by date written and then by content. She finds a few diagrams of the now washed away scene that are slightly off in proportion so she finds a blank page and re-sketches them to be accurate with the photos. Makes a little graph and chart and redoes his funny little arrows in her own neat script, keeping the spelling as is and highlighting correlations. It’s a fun little project with no one else in the office. What’s the lawyer going to do, tattle? 

Rook puts the coffee on again. She puts the daily newspaper on Whitehorses desk. She sits down to read Jane Eyre. Everyone turns up after lunch, including Nancy, who realises she missed Hot Lawyer, and correctly blames Rook. Staci takes a look at his desk, a brief glimmer of irritation that flows into consideration when he realises how far off his own diagrams were. 

The lawyer left a pamphlet in their pigeonholes, presumably while Rook was ignoring him. Rook’s is the only one that Nancy doesn’t bin right away, the traitor. 

Staci is still not talking when Rook’s shift ends. She lingers in her expensive leather jacket, backpack over her shoulder. Staci is staring at the pictures of _ Jane DeLainey’s _ body like it can tell him something. Like _ marker 15: two fingers and pulped mass _can say something. There is nothing she can do, she should leave. Instead she looks at Nancy and they share an unhappy moment of commiseration. 

Nancy is still looking at Rook when she says. “Staci, baby, can you help me with something over here?”

Staci breaks away, even throws a sarcastic _ what? _at Nancy’s well-known attempts to make Staci more of her bitch than he already is. Rook breathes, Nancy breathes, and for the thirty seconds it takes for Staci to get up and Rook to fetch the fucking pamphlet from her pigeonhole, the cold war between them is settled. It’ll be back in the morning when Nancy doesn’t bring her a danish and Rook over-steeps her herbal tea, but until daybreak Nancy is fine by her. 

She goes out to Breakpoint, a little hideaway the department sometimes uses for traffic stops, kicks her feet onto the dashboard and reads all about her weird neighbours. _ The Project at Eden’s Gate. _

What little there is in this pamphlet makes her so goddamn angry she can’t even see. There’s a whole genre of books in her Goodreads To Read section. All of them are the true-not-true stories of girls sold into slavery, girls who escape captivity, cults. The gory expose of true crime novels that care more about the voyeuristic sex of gore that is human evil then the people it maims. Comment sections about how terrible the perpetrators are and how _ unlucky _ the victims, and how sad they are, even as they write novels worth of crap that might as well be mastrubation, for all they understand, for all they _ see. _It’s disgusting, it makes her angry. When she’s sad, she reads through the blurbs, imagines strangling the authors, culling down the readers. 

As far as she’s concerned, this is the _ exact same thing. _

Deep in her gut she understands the draw, the magnetism of that kind of resilience. Her head is separated by miles of nerve endings from her gut. She’s not gullible. Two kinds of people read this and think, _ yes. _People who need to believe and people who need to watch. The needy are vulnerable, they’re too willing to follow when they should run. The watchers are worse.

She rips it into little pieces and puts it into her bag to compost later. It’s passing seven, growing dark and it’s the nightly round up at the local tonight. Rook is on tap for the first round. 

Rook is second to last to arrive. She’s shrugging out of her jacket and into a seat when Staci stomps in, ashen but a little more together than he has been. Rook buys cheap beers and then a round of whiskey. She’s got _ money _money but she tries not to flaunt it. Finally, another round of beers. 

“Honest question, I read the pamphlet,” Rook scratches at the edge of her beer label, paper peeling and wet beneath her fingernails, “and did the uh, Father, really Hot-Crazy scale his own siblings? Is that actually part of the scripture?”

Then she and Staci have to explain both How I Met Your Mother and the Hot-Crazy scale to everyone around them. They get it done but Staci has gone down a little for his deep knowledge of HIMYM lore and Hudson is _ more _scared of her which, why?

Whitehorse flushes. “In, in a manner of speaking.” And then he looks mortified. 

“Don’t worry boss, we know you wouldn’t snitch if you weren’t a little gone.” Rook hums. “Did he get it right at least?” 

Staci throws up a little laughing. She’s glad to see him something other than rattled but he never actually answers her. 

\--

She doesn’t ever meet Joseph Before. She meets him at two am in his territory when he’s shirtless and she’s doing a job she’s only had for fourteen months. She sits next to him in the helicopter he crashes and the whole time they’re heading towards the ground she’s thinking about the deer, that fucking _ deer- _

She never even considers the Eden’s Gate pamphlets after the first time because who does that? Who looks at the kind of trauma that makes mince of children and says _ I could make a religion out of that. _But falling out of the sky because a charismatic madman said so, she does think she should have burnt it instead of putting it into compost. Even worms deserve better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All Jacob actually said was that she seemed a little tougher than Staci, which was not, in his opinion, hard. Joseph just decided to make it weird. 
> 
> There's a pretty specific playlist that goes with this but I'm not sure if plugging Spotify or making a youtube list is better.
> 
> You can fine me over at Swallowsandsparrows on tumblr, it's a side blog but it'll have Content. I'm going to try and update once a week all the way through each universe, so see you next Monday!


	2. See Us Together, Must Be a Bad Dream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> you don’t know bad, bad, bad until it’s all around  
you don’t know mad, mad, mad until it’s common ground

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a couple days late because my uh, entire country is on fire and also flooding and I happen to live between two dangerous fire zones. Fire proofing became paramount. 
> 
> Not thrilled (?) with this chapter but it was going to be a tough one regardless. The next one should be much more grounded, I guess?

It was called Virtue. An expensive hobby for bored trophy wives and the generationally wealthy. You went to weekend retreats and listened to a man stand tall and talk about how we had to know how to protect each other. Kindness and compassion were the outward signs, people who had the time and the wealth to be seen doing the right thing. The O’Hare’s were legacy admissions, her grandfather was on The Committee, all capitals always, and when his daughter brought home her architect husband from Kenya he swallowed his wine and ripped out all the new admissions that might have raised a brow. 

At five her grandfather buys her a gun, a dedicated dance teacher and an aikido instructor. 

Temperance grew up in white dresses and combat boots. She went to elocution lessons. She was beautiful and untouchable. _ If you grow up well, _ her grandfather would say to the boys, _ a girl like that will be your wife. _

When Temperance turned nineteen she snuck out to a rock show with her university friends. At the same time a girl they called Molly Hearthope who was actually a girl from Missouri named Natalie Barker went to the police and told them everything. When Temperance turned nineteen her older sister drank a bottle of wine and all of the medication she’d been on all her life and went for a swim. Temperance didn’t know, she was having her first orgasm in a bathroom stall at a dive bar. All her life she’d been told that she was the reward for obedience. To have Temperance was to belong. You couldn’t be a Virtuous man until you had a good wife. 

When Temperance was nineteen she didn’t know who she’d be at twenty. 

\--

In all honesty Rook knew she was fucked the second Cameron Burke saw her. 

Cocky, enamored of status and uncomfortable already with how little anyone here gave a fuck, he'd seen her pretty face and decided she was coming along wether anyone liked it or not. Getting out of the crashed helicopter, running away, finding Dutch, she was still wondering whether his interest, his _ insistence _ had been about impressing her or punishing everyone through her. 

Kill girls to hurt men. 

Burke has gone to Faith which is poetic if nothing else. 

Things get tough. Things get really goddamn hard to deal with. There’s John, Mr Hot Lawyer himself on the radio at all goddamn hours making a nuisance of himself. Talking like they all owe him something. There’s Faith, and whatever the Bliss is, that makes people afraid of themselves. There’s whatever Jacob is doing that makes the Whitetails, the Resistance up in the mountains, some of the hardest motherfuckers in a state that is sixty percent people with guns and forty percent wildlife that wants to kill you. Things get really goddamn hard to do, when all she has to do is wake up and kill people. Take an outpost and kill people. Walk into the woods to take a shit and also kill people. She does get a dog, though. Smart boy, loves getting her more guns and ammo with which to continue the job, which is going places and killing people. Her first pet. 

Rook has had Boomer for half an hour and if anyone took him off her she would kill them and then herself. 

Blue-green days in a place building up dead like it’s the end of the world. Probably because it is the end of the world for some. Boomer’s fur is a little stiff under her fingers from the mud and the blood. She spends some time dampening a rag and running it over his body. She sings a little, not a good voice for it, but Boomer is the only thing she has to take care of. Not a County, not a bullpen full of friends, or Nancy (_ fuck Nancy _) who she’d fought bitterly but only because Rook was thirty three and divorced, thirty three and like Nancy but for the years separating their ages. Thirty three and left behind. 

Alright. Well, alright.

\--

Virtue didn’t have many churches. Churches were for people who needed things, and if you were Virtuous you didn’t need anything. It was only ever optics. Rufus O’Hare and the rest of his Committee kept their eye on the prize and the ball moving. They built themselves places to gather, painted them white so you had to wear the very best of Sunday best or risk sticking out. Places that made people like Scarlett O’Hare breathe easily because _ the best _ was all she’d ever known, and the thought that she might have to deal with _ the worst _made her shake. Diligence, then Charity, then Patience, Humility and Kindness, Temperance and finally Chastity, learnt to sit in the satin backed chairs and listen to men with things to say. Three times a week, not including every third Sunday’s all day sermon-like venture. 

And then Beaumont arrived. 

He holds his fraying hat in his hands and hangs his head low as he begins his speech. It wasn’t Rufus’s idea, or he wouldn’t have made it long enough to stand at the front of the ‘church’ they’d converted for their meetings. It’s huge airy venetian style bathrooms were no place for worn down shoes. It’s a retreat by any other name, one that’s tax deductible on income and ‘non-profit’ on forms. Beaumont, no first name, talks to his hands, his shitty sneakers and the god that they’d never let through the door. Not in name, but in his proclamation of virtue. It is _ enough _ to be good. It is _ right _ to be charitable. It is _ righteous _ to work for the betterment of yourself and others. _ But why not do more? _

Beaumont is the first person to make Temperance notice a hole in her life. She thinks it’s a six foot, golden haired, humble man sort of hole, but it’s an absence nonetheless. He’s electric. 

Grandfather tips her chin up, takes in her blown out eyes and high flush. “This changes things.” Rufus O’Hare muses while they sit in pews that didn’t mean anything twenty minutes ago. He hums and takes her small hand in his.“Have you been to the playhouse lately, my sweet?”

“Father.” Scarlett O’Hare says, voice sharp. “We have to stay for lunch, and to great the new speaker.”

“You may do so. In fact have him meet Diligence. I think Temperance and I deserve a day at the theatre.” 

“Father.” Scarlett says again, the same way. “Diligence is in Morocco with St-Marie’s charity. She’s the treasurer.” 

“Daughter.” Grandfather had a way of saying that, that made her mother shut all the way down. Scarlett O’Hare, the scariest bitch in the PTA, the hell-bane of the charity scene, shut down with one word. “I am well aware of what my granddaughter is doing. That has nothing at all to do with my request. I think we’ll go to New York, Temperance, you and I and Kindness. Broadway and High Tea.” Temperance _ almost _ refuses. There is something wrong with Kindness, something that reminds her of a viral infection and pus-boils. She’s ten and she has no words for it but there is something _ wrong _with Kindness.

“Kindness is with her therapist.” Scarlett looks sour. “You should know _ that. _”

“Should I?” He muses. Kindness isn’t good at being lovely the way Charity is. She’s not beautiful to the point of obscenity the way Diligence is. She doesn’t have Patience’s singing voice or Humility’s wit. Not even Temperance’s ability to remain pleased and joyful through any situation. “I think not.” 

They go, sans Kindness, to New York. The Phantom of the Opera is playing, because of course it is. When they return Beaumont has better shoes and the same hat in his hands. His sky blue eyes and gap toothed smile is the same. The curls of his golden hair make Temperance feel shaky. She is absolutely in love. 

“I have seen it.” Beaumont smiles and opens his arms. Everyone leans forward. “I have seen all of us in the true world, and my people, it is glorious!”

“Well that won’t do.” Grandfather mutters. Temperance is close enough to hear him. “Scarlett. When does Diligence return from Morocco?”

It is Monday in October when Diligence returns home in a white and blue Jil Sander dress. By the end of dinner the following Friday Beaumont can’t look at her without stopping. The marrow of his bones reaching for her. Temperance has seen this before. It will be a June wedding, for tradition.

Grandfather handles all the monetary arrangements. He shakes Beaumont’s hand and clasps his chin and grips him by the back of the neck. It’s friendly except for how the only things Grandfather loves are six or seven girls ranging from forty five to six, the ages of her mother to Chastity her youngest sister, and the endless pursuit of power. Beaumont might have a touch of the true thing. He may even see a path through the undergrowth for the wealthy, to a place where their money can do good, but he _ loves _Diligence. And love will vanquish all. 

Temperance is getting fitted in a bespoke waiting room at the family tailor. The assistant has a wide array of Dior ready to be tailored to her small form and she’s been dashing in and out of the changing room all morning. Scarlett is in another room handling Diligence’s breakdown. Temperance can hear it, it has her lower lip shaking, but everytime she tears up her Grandfather knocks his cane against the floor. Everyone quiets. 

Another assistant has shoes and a selection of faux pearl earrings set in fun coloured plastics. Temperance will grow up and be the sort of woman who wears real pearls but she’s still five years too young by the family rule. Grandfather brought the costume jewellery and the fun little hat with a visor and a faux flower. She fiddles with it, the little diamond clasp gripping her curly hair oddly. The shoe assistant is sweet to her. The dress assistant doesn’t want to touch her unevenly brown skin. 

He leans forward, says, “You are special.” He clips fuschia pink earrings to her ears, the skin pinching around his fingers. “I love all of you. Very much. But _ you _are special. I don’t know what it will be. I don’t know when it will happen. But you will be more than the others.”

May comes and goes. Most of June too, but the wedding happens on a small island with the thick scent of jasmine in the air. Diligence wears a demure dress and her warm brown hair straight to the middle of her back. They twirl and they twirl and they twirl. Temperance sits at the children’s table with Kindness, Chastity and her Grandfather. Chastity is the only one younger than her here. Men in black patrol the outer edges. The wait staff are bad at their jobs, too busy watching the guests. Grandfather has not once approached the happy couple. He’s been here, talking to Temperance and Chastity. Their father didn’t even attend, off as usual overseas planning some project. At a little after seven Temperance feels her nose itch. Her head hurts. She begins to tear up.

Diligence takes Beaumont’s hand. They get on a boat. Thirty minutes later there is a sharp noise. 

Diligence returns in another white Jil Sanders dress. Her hand still has her wedding ring on it when she makes her toast. _ To Virtue! _ And they’re all clasping expensive glasses when they sing back _ To Virtue! _ Temperance’s back itches in her hand-stitched dress. Her eyes prick and well over. She lifts a glass full of non-alcoholic apple-wine and says _ To Virtue! _

Tears burn down her face. Like fire. But she raises her glass. 

Grandfather removes his handkerchief -monogrammed _ R.O.H _\- and dabs her eyes. “Men are dangerous, my sweet.” He clasps her shoulder. Hell-fire warm in the June wedding night. “Women can be too, but not in the same way.” He walks off to dance with Diligence, whistling under his breath. 

\--

It is terribly awkward when John tries to drown her. Mostly because she's politely waiting for him to let her up. She shouldn’t be surprised by his sheer lack of hospitality but some part of her is still offended. The Bliss isn’t as described either, It’s meant to make things blurry and blended. Rook just gets a weird aftertaste and white sparkles she can shake off. John doesn’t notice. Not when Joey is there to scare. Not when Rook is there to _ convert _ . She decides, immediately, that if her confession is the difference between John getting _ atonement _ and dying unloved in the dirt, she will put him in the dirt. Even when she screams _ yes. _Especially then. 

John leans down to her ear. Breath minty with a tiny hint of garlic from lunch. Nice for him, she supposes. “Do you know what your sin is?” 

Rook scoffs. “What, not _ Gluttony? _”

John is leaning all the way over her with his tattoo gun. “Do you see yourself that way?”

Ugh. Fucker. No, she doesn’t. 

When he calls her _ Wrath _ she doesn’t laugh at him. Wrath was _ always _ Patience’s vice. _ Become Wrath and let it become you, in the end you’ll be nothing. _Very poetic. Very, very wrong. For what she faults she has Wrath is very much the wrong word. She steals and then crashes a plane about it. Fuck John Seed and his high handed assumptions. 

When she makes it back, makes it through a few more trials up to and including a brief unfortunate excursion to Faith’s region, the tattoo has flattened out to a persistent itch. She scratches it absently over the fire Sharky makes seemingly as a by product of his own existence. 

Rook has had Charlemagne Boshaw for one single day and if anyone took him off her she’d kill them.

Extreme, yes, and she knew him before, a little, but he’s keeping up and _ that _ is a skill worth keeping around. She drags him out of Faith’s region and into Holland Valley. Mary May gives her a long look. Like, a very long look. Temperance stares back. She’s not sure why anyone’s surprised, she _ loves _Staci, and he’s not exactly low maintenance. She likes his honesty, the way his feelings are open and possibly too upfront. Likes that he likes her dog. She can, has and will ignore a lot of character flaws but she doesn’t really think Sharky has that many. Certainly not in comparison to others she’s loved more. She tells him as much one night. 

He does get quiet, though, when she starts systematically working her way through the angels. She picks up some guns, a lot of ammo and then walks through the Bliss that means very little to her. It's one shot: head, one shot: heart. Sometimes they just stand in front of her, waiting. Those make her eyes sting but she doesn't waver. Armies of angels against one Rook. 

\--

She dreams of graduation.

She dreams of standing in five inch heels and a knee length dress. Her robes are dark and her hat is askew but she’s smiling. Five years to complete a three year degree but she did it, all alone on the last part. She’s been dancing for her income for sixteen months and it’s okay. Like clockwork she gets a check from Grandfather and like clockwork she donates it to someone else. 

Her father arrived early on a train. Kissed her head. Said _ she’s not coming, _ and sat down to work. Good. Fine. Let Scarlett O’Hare stay in her Hampton’s house out of season. Let her pretend the last four years didn’t fucking happen. Fuck Temeprance for trying, right? For having an _ After _instead of some shambling funeral for the wealth and reputation she didn’t build and didn’t care for. Virtue died an ignoble death but she still had some daughters left over. If the naming scheme bothers her that's her own damn fault. 

‘What will they call you?” Chastity asks. 

Temperance tips her head. In dreams people just appear. “Hey, pumpkin. Don’t know yet. Most of the people here know me as Mercy.”

“Your stage name.” Chastity’s eyes twinkle knowingly. 

“My nomme-de-guerre, yes.”

“Not what that means.” 

Another woman in the same colouring as the first two snaps closed an umbrella despite the clear skied day. Patience, the only one to get the O’Hare green eyes. “What will they call you Temperance.”

Temperance rolls her eyes. “Hey, you.” If Patience is here then-

“Hello.” Charity turns to their father, on his laptop in the first row, and scowls. “Really papa?”

Their father waves a hand. 

“Very Mr Bennett of him.” Chastity giggles, but she’s more of Temperance’s disposition than the others and sits amiably next to him.

“What _ are _they going to call you?” Charity muses. “It’s a lot of name for one girl.”

Around them the dream goes rancid. Just a moment but it takes on all the hues of a nightmare. Temperance smiles through, thinks of alcohol, says, “Let’s change the subject?” 

(“That can’t be her real name- What do we _ say- _Mercy? Just call her Mercy, or Temperance?”)

A man comes by with a silver tray. Bless her mind. 

“Have you found anyone?” Charity asks over a glass of champagne. 

Temperance has a standing invitation to all the husband finding parties after her first year, Before, when she brought in a bunch of _ III _ and _ VI’s _just to have someone to talk to. Usually she only goes when one of her sorority sisters makes her, or when she needs to get truly fucked up on prescription meds. Charity is three children in to what amounts to an arranged marriage with someone as closed down and emotionally self-sufficient as herself. This is, as far as she is concerned, the ideal situation.

“No.” Temperance sighs, like it bothers her. That was never her path. “Just a few good John’s.”

Charity playful slaps her. Patience leans forward, around their sister. “Enough.”

Temperance sticks her tongue out at her. 

Which is apparently the wrong move. Patience steps around to put a tan gloved finger on Temperance’s collarbone. “Will you just behave?” Patience hisses. “We didn’t have to be here, you know. No one wants to indulge this farce of yours.”

Temperance can’t make her face ease, or her smile dim, so she settles for, “Fuck you, _ Patience. _”

“Enough. What would mother say?” Charity remove’s Patience finger. She censures Temperance with a hard look, like _ she _ incited it. “She’d say we need to keep up a strong front. So Temperance will continue to smile. We will be pleasant _ Patience _ and we will remember that _ Temperance _makes her own choices, regardless of the cost.”

“Fuck you, too, Charity.” Patience growls. “You’re a whore _ Mercy _ and pretending that your _ Temperance _when it suits you is a slight against the whole fucking family-”

“Patience-”

“-you should have come home. He wanted to see _ you. _That should have mattered more than some girl from who-the-fuck-cares-

“Patience-”

“-and you should have seen it coming. Not Diligence, you’re a real cunt but I don’t blame you for _ that _-

“Patience!-”

“-what was he _ meant _ to do! Was he meant to just let her rot! We’re fucking _ family _!”

“PATIENCE,” Charity roars. 

This is a dream. It’s something like a dream, at least. Temperance can’t stop smiling even as tears begin to burn down her face. It’s horror-show stuck on her face like she’s some fucking pantomine doll in an old time-y beauty pageant. In her fucking underwear on a podium. In the real world Patience didn’t stop there, she didn’t stop at all, she called Temperance a whore, a jezebel, a snake bitch and a fucking traitor. She was drunk and belligerent and unhappy that marrying a high powered Republican church man meant being married to a high powered man, who went to church. When Virtue had still been possible _ O’Hare _ opened a lot of doors and ended a lot of conversations. Patience O’Hare had had the same honey smile as Scarlett before her and twice the ambition. Molly ruined it, and Temperance didn’t come home. 

They’re still sisters. So Temperance does the _ really _shitty thing. “Sorry I have a job.”

Patience screams but the dream cuts off, not even in here will she listen to her family scream, leaves her suspended mid-fury. Temperance heads to the podium says _ it’s Mercy. Not Temperance. Keep the O’Hare, _ and fuck it, lets the pieces fall. Charity was the beauty pageant girl, not as devastating to look at as Diligence but she was Girl-Next-Door to Chastity and Patience’s _ classic elegance _ , to Humility and Kindness’s _ striking, _ to Temperance’s lightning in a bottle _ charming beauty. _ Charity had awards for being the right size and shape and letting people all but put calipers to her skull, but Temperance has nearly ten years of cheer and a two year anniversary of pole dancing so she throws her hair back and fucking poses. Lights flash, the dream slipping between all the times she’s known she was on display: in her Grandfather’s office, in the family Christmas picture, in school hallways, in nightclubs and by herself, when she should have been alone. She does what she does best. 

There’s a man flashing in her peripheral. He’s striking, handsome to be sure, but there’s something in the way he moves that holds her attention. Weight from the hips, shoulders perfectly back. In black pants a little too tight to be attention seeking, a vest the same colour and a stark white shirt. There’s something that reminds her a little of Beau and something that says they’re entirely different breeds. No hat wringing for this one. Confident. Well, confidence is always good. 

She shifts her attention back to her sisters in the front row. Her father peering down at his open laptop. Smile, they didn’t have to be here. Smile, they know what you did. Smile, they missed visitation to be here. Temperance waves. Chastity waves back. Charity and Patience do not. 

“Mercy O’Hare,” the woman says and she walks across. The world is silent except for Chastity clapping and her father typing. All the seats filled with people stand and stare. She is being watched. Out of the corner of her eye she sees their deer heads and those Bliss flower eyes. Strange, and not strange. There is one man still seated, the right corner of the front row, two in. Mr Confident. He’s turning the itinerary pamphlet over in his hands murmuring the words aloud to himself. He seems so damn confused about where he is. Well, she thinks, that makes two of us. He’s not recognisable to her the way the rest of this shit fuck of a memory is. 

_ Oh, _ her sleepy brain supplies, _ it’s because he’s wearing a shirt. _

“_Fuck _no.” She says aloud.

Joseph’s eyes swing to her, wide and blue behind the yellow. 

\--

So it turns out Hope County isn’t actually prepared for a weirdly skilled lifelong athlete with anger issues and an extremely limited capacity for fear. Temperance tears right the fuck through.

The Cult she’s not surprised by. These are not soldiers, no matter the stories coming out of the mountains. They’re _ convinced _ not _ confident. _They have patterns that they follow regardless of how ill-suited they are to the action. That’s why she uses a shovel for a solid nine days. To make a point. 

“You’re just violent,” Grace says, over a cup of joe in the Spread Eagle. It’s some of the last good coffee in Hope County. 

She doesn’t know if _ that’s _ true. It probably looks that way to Grace’s actual training. There’s no way to say _ I took aikido and krav maga for fifteen years, this shit is just in me _in a way that doesn’t mean coming clean about stuff she’s been keeping a fair weather eye on for decades. It's all a weird kind of muscle memory. She never really practiced her skills on actual opponents but apparently the length between practice match and death match is short. For her, at least. 

Does it hurt? Yes. Will she stop? Who knows. 

"Hey now," Temperance starts. She lifts the mug to her mouth and drains it.

Grace laughs. It's a huge, comfortable belly thing and it lights a fire under her. She’s ninety percent sure Grace does not want to make out with her. It’s deeply inappropriate but she is actually hurt.

"You good?" Grace asks with a soft, sweet enough smile. One that Temperance rarely earns but treasures in a way that could be either really fun in bed or a horrid warning sign she's going to ignore.

"I-"

(In a nightclub, when she's underage and a man is slipping an arm around her waist, far too old for her. Far too old to be trying to slip that pill in her mouth. Another arm slides around, slings her up and she sees yellow before the memory cuts out, all the sin she didn't do strung between them)

(In a field at a Virtue seminar. The grass is green and yellow and filled with blooming pale flowers. In her cupped hands is a chain of white gold studded with rubies, a chain she loses five times over twenty years. Temperance's white dress is staining at the knees, her neck aches. They're praying in a ring for fortune they don't need, protection from people who aren't their enemies, for glory that comes from unworthy actions. Joseph slips a hand over the back of her sunburnt neck, then his rosary to rest in the softness of her throat, to fall into the high neck of her dress and rest, cold, against skin. He leans over and says _ his _version into her braided hair)

(In her biochem seminar when she's bored. She won't talk to him or acknowledge that this happens. The professor is going on and on about the process of decomposition, the point at which a thing becomes another thing, or a separate process, or a twin of its own self. The way in which one thing is all things and a mirror. For some reason Joseph has his own notebook with his own words, annoying, so she reaches over and draws on it. Wishes he wouldn't smile, though. It's nice and she's so _ damned bored _)

(_ It's the end. It's the end. It's the end. The world was on fire and no one could save her but- But her eyes burn. They burn fire down her face and her back aches. In this moment, when she sees him, she sees six heads and a crown of flame, severed limbs and the mark of a wicked animal _)

"-am just peachy."

\--

Instead of sleep she goes through old newspapers on the Rye’s lumpy couch. Kim is sitting with her, her feet ache and Nick has reached a whole new level of Helicopter Husband. Nick has gone to meet some Resistance members. Temperance would have been invited but apparently they _ really suck _ according to Kim, and are _ not exactly the type of people he’d want around his wife _according to Nick, proving that bigotry lives on. 

“Ares.” Kim says flat. “_ Total _Ares.”

“Fits.” She marks down the horoscope to Jacob’s name leaving only John unmatched. “John? I guess someone would say Scorpio but I get solid Capricorn vibes. He’s a lawyer and did convince someone to make him that awful bespoke coat. That’s textbook nouveau-riche.” She raises fingers as she makes her points. “Prone to depression and likely to treat it with addictive substances, terrible at sex most of the time. Always starts too early and comes long after you want them to go away. Novel way to suck at fucking. Deeply needy. All the signs.”

“Nick’s a Capricorn.”

“My condolences.”

Kim snorts. Rook is used to the _ oh you’re bad _giggles but snorting will do.

The Rye’s are people, in the sense that they’re complicated and they say things wrong and they only know how to deal with her maybe eighty percent of the time. Nick actually cannot look at her properly because he loves Kim with every bit of heart and soul in him but Rook trips so many of his triggers it’s not even funny. To him, of course, she and Kim find it funny. 

Rook’s pen drags down the page and begins to doodle. It’s been ...awhile now, since this whole thing started. She’s not getting tired. Not exactly. It’s more like some nebulous film is coming off the top of her. Temperance doesn’t practice many forms of self deception: she grew up in a difficult environment, she took fifteen years of martial arts and was a first class gymnast the whole time. She has no fear. She has no family. There is nothing to lose taking outposts and shooting people she’d rather protect, even if they’ve picked up arms against her. Nothing here for her to lose except herself. 

There is something cracking open in her, yellow-yoked and runny, and she’s not sure what it is. It’s tied to Joseph _ fucking _ Seed and his nightmare death cult, but that isn’t a name, or a description or a _ purpose. _ It’s just a hazy direction she can’t follow. _ Shouldn’t _follow. 

Maybe she’s just going crazy.

Absently she scratches at John’s mark on her. _ Wrath _is already healing. The thick scarring has already leeched out to thin red lines, in a week it’ll be healed completely. 

Kim has been quiet, she asks, “Do you need something for it?”

“No.” Temperance smiles, wry. “I’m hard to hurt. I heal quick. This is practically nothing.”

“Still.” Kim stands with some effort, belly a little bit of an ordeal. “I’ll get you some water.”

While Kim’s doing that Nick returns from his Resistance specific errand. He’s got his glasses on but his hat off, twisting it in his hands. “Hey, Temp, you had a degree in something right?”

“Bio-Chem, why?”

“That, uh, cover things like drugs.” Nick presses his lips together. “Like the Bliss.”

“In theory. I’ve been Blissed and it’s not a simple thing.”

“If you had a starting point-”

“Nick.” Rook looks exasperated. “What are you asking for?”

“We got a defector, today. Rare one.” The peggies don’t defect, not really. Some of them have been plants, most of them have been new ‘recruits’ who have slipped their leash. Often enough they might as well have _ been _ plants, for the damage they do. Especially out of the Whitetails. “He was a high ranking member of John’s, got spooked when his sister went for confession and never came out again. He said that the Bliss has got a weakness and that it’s got an antidote. John has part of the puzzle hidden in his bunker and his piece of shit siblings have the rest. Their immunity isn’t permanent, especially because Faith is still tinkering with it. They have to take their goddamn needles like the rest of us. Once a month they _ all _ go to Joseph _ at the same time _ and take their medication.” Nick looks her dead in the eye, willing her to get with the program. 

They could just kill them at Joseph’s, now that they have a singular target, but the Bliss wouldn’t end with them. The Bliss is a symptom and a disease all of its own. “A recipe for the Bliss?” _ Yes, _ some hidden voice says, _ take this chance, leap, leap. _“I think I could, Nick. Me and Lindsey, I think we really could. At least,” and now she’s thinking about it, it seems so obvious, “at least give people the immunity the Seed’s have. If it’s the result of some formula and not just a lie they told-

Kim looks between them. “What are you thinking?

Nick runs a dry tongue over cracked lips. “Means we have a chance.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS IS GRACE ARMSTRONG LOVING HOURS ONLY
> 
> also heeeeeere (https://sparrowsandswallows.tumblr.com/post/189199298536/i-will-be-here-a-playlist-by-carpebooty-on) is the playlist and also my tumblr pls be my friend i'm v funny
> 
> also, also: Jacob = Aries. Faith = Pisces w some wicked Scorp. Joe is a Libra/Scorpio cusp because every single one I've ever met has been terrifying and no one ever agreed w me until AFTER they'd done some weird shit. Temp is a Sag like me bc I said and also every Scorp I've ever met (that was not a blood relation) just gave up trying to intimidate/fuck me and Temp needs that energy.


	3. Don't Even Hiccup. Or I'm Emptying a Round

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i'm just warning and preparing ya

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SHUT UP JOHN SEED

The staircase in the old Clareton house library creaks every fifth step, a noisy little whisper that comes from the worn-down middle and the weight of the thousandth and some body on it. It has seventy steps from top to bottom, so you notice. The Clareton's are old Virtue stock from before the rebranding when it was just about money, and even before that when it was about people her skin colour and how best to keep them. The Clareton House is the definition of 'old as houses', grand and gruesome with its ghosts. Temperance climbs to the top where the floor is covered in old Turkish rugs and the stained glass window throws pink and gold light down on to the ground. She lays down among the dust and opens her book. 

"I never liked that one," Joseph says from the leather chair in the corner.

Temperance is in her cream dress and heels just after service. Downstairs Scarlett O'Hare is buying a senator with Patience's coy smile. Upstairs Temperance has her legs thrown wide, on her back, looking up at a man who is not there.

With her own coy smile, she says, "why not?"

\--

There are four keys. 

John, at least, is easy. “Hey, are you a Capricorn?” she says into her radio at about four in the morning. 

“Cancer.” A voice replies in less than two minutes. “Good morning Deputy.”

“Well, that makes no fucking sense.” Temperance stops a little way from the ranch. Stretches her legs and dips down to touch her toes with the radio pressed to _ on. _ “You don’t strike me as a homebody at all.”

“Don’t I?” He muses. “You seem quite interested in my home. Perhaps you should visit for a chat or two.”

“Eat my ass, John.”

“So _ rude, _” he hisses, there we go, that’s the John we all know and want to stab. “Haven’t I been polite? Hospitable? There’s only so many times you can slap away extended hands before they close forever.”

“Please,” she says, genuinely amused, “let me know when I hit my final chance. I’d love to wave it goodbye.”

He goes quiet. 

“Do you think this is a game?”

“No.” The night is mild, for Montana. Clear dark skies and lovely foliage on the upper branches of the trees. “I think a lot of things about this, not a lot of them kind, but I’m not playing games.”

“And yet you refuse to see my point of view.”

“Not your point of view,” she says, not unkind. 

“Temperance. The virtue of humanity and self-moderation. Restraint from sin. It binds all the others -knowing when patience must give way to wrath, when pride must give way to humility, that’s control, _ temperance _ .” The performance rises in him clear across the space between them. Him in his home free to move without fear. Her, in the woods, always feeling a little like prey. “What do you do, I wonder, when you lose control? Do you shake? Gasp? Do you think yourself immune from the light of God? That virtue in your name makes me think you don’t, why else would you let it hold you but as a reminder of who _ must _hold you? Let me play that part for you. Let me find the edges of your self and take you past them. If you trust me, trust this process, I will give you back more than you could ever imagine.” 

Temperance clicks to answer and then lets it go. Honestly, what the fuck John. 

She presses down to speak. “When I was nineteen I took up pole dancing. For fun, I was competitive in dance, cheer and gymnastics at various points and one of my sorority sisters took it up to make money. Not that she told anyone.” She knows that there are things that even John Duncan-Seed couldn’t find out. Things that are buried under red tape so deep you need to have a security clearance just to get near it. He’ll know, probably, that she’s from _ money _ money and she had a rich banker husband. If she says _ sorority _ he should know what she’s getting at. “And, uh, about eighteen months later I picked it up myself. My family...cut me out. For decent reasons. Got kicked out of my sorority too. Again, decent reasons. I had a regular there for about eight months who really came through for me when I was in a dark place.” She pretends to need a second. “Let’s call him Duncan.” That was _ mostly _ melted Ice Bitch. “He worked in finance of course. Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday and Public Holidays. Always tipped. He read the bible." She remembers a deep laugh, brown hair, kind face as she went round and round. “Straight up. Read the Bible out loud. Did the crossword. He talked to us as we did our spins - _ what’s six letters for _ or just random passages of the bible. He’s the only reason I have the first clue about what your brother’s going on about. At the beginning of my last year of my degree, I got kicked out of my share house. Homeless. I remember complaining about it to the girls at the bar one night, found out later that Duncan had overhead me and put $1000 behind the bar for me. He smoked, so on my break, I went out to talk to him, thank him. The smoking area was behind and tucked away, a shitty little alcove you can’t see from the street. When I got there he was just _ wasted _ and I got this vibe, felt like my back was on fire with it like my brain just went _ he’s not a good man. _ ” _ should have listened. Always should’ve listened. _ “He put his hand on my throat and tried to fuck me through my underwear. Too drunk to stop me, you’ve seen what I do to sober men with training let alone some- Anyway. He came back a few days later after I came back to finish my shift with bruises on my throat and he just _ screamed _ at us from the side entrance. _ You whores, you cunts, you sluts. _ Turns out we were his great control exercise. Like Gandhi. He went and taunted himself with what he wanted. The second he slipped he blamed it on us, for being there, being _ nice. _ ” The boarding school accent starts to bleed through again. Temperance holds it back. “‘ _ Mercy, you don’t have any mercy in you, if you did you’d get down here and fuck me like I deserve.’ _ You wanna know what I think of when I think _ control _? I think of the sex-addicted misogynist that put three girls through college on tips alone. It’d be nice if it was clean. If I could just -let you guide me, or whatever, but I don’t know what’s driving you. Not really. Maybe you’re just another Duncan. 

“Having said all that, I have a question and I need an honest answer. Promise?”

John jumps to answer. “Of course.”

“Is this a sex thing?”

There is complete and utter silence from his end. Temperance sniggers. 

“_ To whom much is given much will still be asked, _” she says in Latin. A phrase a day calendar from years and years ago. “Maybe try and, I don’t know, treat me like a full-grown adult woman and not a wayward child, yeah?”

Now she waits. 

“You are not a child.” He says it like he kind of wants to call her a bitch. “Noted, Deputy.”

He goes silent. Temperance waits. There’s no one around here, not right now. The guards slipped away after spotting her, all of John's people a little too eager to be helpful to the Herald and a little less eager to stay at their posts. It’ll be ten now, maybe fifteen- 

A rustle from behind, probably another goddamn wolverine. She turns to look behind her, finds trees and a portion of the Seed Ranch defences. She turns in time to catch the grin, the undone shirt and the baseball bat of the person coming towards her. John Seed swings at her head. “Hello darling.” 

\--

“Let’s start over.” John spins the chair around and straddles it. “You were saying something about your previous occupation.” His torture chamber has a rather fetching low light now that she’s here on purpose. It also has skin on the walls and uncleaned, bloody instruments but you can’t have everything.

“Housewife?”

“Exotic dancer.”

“Ah.” She rolls her shoulders forward to feel the strain where her arms tied behind her. Really tied down then. “Well. John. That is none of your business.”

That is not the right answer. That is an answer that gets her stabbed.

“As I was saying,” John huffs. “Your confession. You’ve started it, let’s see it through.” 

Temperance seals her lips shut and blows her cheeks our like she's some kind of pufferfish. John sighs and rolls away like she's just so predictable. He picks up her pack and takes out her things. Her eco-friendly water bottle. A packet of cigarettes she stole. A few lighters. 

"Is it any good?" He holds up her copy of _ The Years of Rice and Salt. _“Don't have much time for heretical texts, given the end times."

Joseph has a trove of books hidden in his own bunker. She knows that this book is, in fact, in that trove. She’s been idling her way through his recommendation list even though he has no idea he gave it to her.

("Libraries are free," he says deadpan, at the end of a thrillingly dry conversation on literary theory.)

She replies, "Great theoretical project, got some deeply racist undertones. To be expected."

"Faults in a great project? Heaven forbid."

Her mouth tips coy. "Joseph forbid."

"He wouldn't forbid _ you _anything." John sighs, like it’s an inconvenience. "Not if you join us."

He drops the book, stretches his arms overhead like a comfortable cat. She’s watching, trying to figure out how much is comfort versus performance. "See you, you stopped killing people -well, not the Angels, they still die. But for the last week you've been 'hitting meat' as Jacob so callously put it. What's wrong, Wrath?"

"You're words, not mine."

"Would you truly have preferred gluttony?"

"No." She draws out the _ o. _ "I'd prefer you didn't do it at all."

"Too bad." He returns to his favourite blunt metal instrument, haphazardly wipes it on a rag and twirls it in his hands. "See, Jacob, Faith, the Father, the all see something in you. I do too, Wrath, we've discussed it, but there's something _ inside _you that just needs. To come. Out." He brings the blunt instrument down on her sides. Drags it on her ribs.

This close she can smell the Tom Ford aftershave, fucking nouveau riche bull_ shit. _"This is the strangest way I've been hit on and I will remind you I was a stripper."

John hums. He walks around to her back, pushes her forward in her bonds until she’s bent over and the pressure on her shoulders is horrid, spit already pooling in her mouth from pain. He does something with the bonds so she has to stay there. He starts at the top of her back, applies pressure with a blade and cuts away the material. With deft fingers, he undoes the bra. For an awful moment the room is quiet, just the sound of him drinking a bottle of water. "And a wife," he pours a little of the water down her back and wipes down. Then he gets a strap.

It is very loud for awhile. Temperance doesn’t stop herself from screaming. 

After awhile- After a long while- He lets up. He gets a mercifully clean cloth and douses her ruined back with something antibacterial. She can smell blood and something a little different -something that might just be _ flesh. _ Wipes down his strap with a work rag and cuts her bonds. She jerks up, the hissing retort she’d thought of between blows eight and nine, calls to action, to _ joining _ four and five, already spilling out. "Oh, way to _ lean in _ John. Go straight to the wedding bells." They’re cheek to cheek, his hand checking her fluttering pulse cool as a cucumber. If he thinks he can weaponise intimacy he should’ve tried a different girl. She presses their skin together: hers is clammy and rough against his beard. " Yes, I was married. His name is Dylan and he’s an investment banker.” He snorts. Alright, he can have that one. “Oh trust me I know. But _ you _ know the sort of clientele my former place of employment set out for. We met at work.” She stutters through it. Push through. Push through. There is a plan and it works if you _ push through. _

"Tell me about your family."

“Sisters. No brothers. Alive.”

“Your parents.”

“Alive.”

“...your grandfather.”

“You went to Harvard. _ You tell me. _”

“Friends.”

“No.”

“Lovers.”

“No.”

“Anyone at all?”

“...no.”

“That’s not quite true.” He leans back to touch her hair gently. His face is soft but his eyes are something else. “I don’t know as much about you as I’d like. You all have virtues for names and blank spaces all over your lives. Someone is _ hiding _ you, Rook, and we can’t get anywhere like that. So, tell me, your sisters: one is married to a Republican senator, one is a New York culture writer, two are married to Wall Street men, one is dead and another is missing. Where is Kindness? Do you know? I do. She’s alone, in an institution. Is it hereditary? Is that why you left them?” He leans forward so their foreheads touch: a sweet mockery of his brothers calling card. “I do understand, my dear. There’s so much pain one’s family can cause and so little you can do to prevent it. Let me in, so we can be cleansed, and take the Path together.”

She considers for a moment. Then quick as a flash she darts forward and bites the meat of his neck. He’d left it exposed. Her whole body _ screams _ but she holds on until she feels it bruise underneath her pressure. John steps back, soundless but breathing harshly, less pain and more a fight for control. Her jaw aches but she can see the marks. If she’d bit down harder and just a little further up she could have got an artery. Stopped his breath in his throat. She doesn’t _ want _blood, not really, but Hope County has a way of filing you down to instincts.

“Wrath.” He presses a palm to his neck. His eyes are dark: not arousal or disgust. Just dark. Whatever John Seed feels is so far away from her, from here, that it doesn't even register as human. Her tongue goes across her teeth. The air is beginning to get stale, a little musky. Must be all the skin. Her eyes flick up to his. “I am not a violent person.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“I’m not.” Her voice cracks. “I was taught violence. All kinds. Temperance, right? Is it Temperance if you never have control? I can’t- I don’t know how to fight because I wanted to learn. I know because the world is full of dangerous men. You think I’m charming for _ my _ benefit? Beautiful for _ me _ ? Nobody fucking asked what I wanted, they just made sure I’d live through it. Do you hear me? I was _ made _this way. You think you get to do this just because your childhood sucks? Like that fucking counts? Don’t y-you th-think that there are people I’d lo-love to...” 

The adrenaline is fading. She’s so _ tired. _ She hangs there worn out for long enough that John relents and cups water in his hands to feed directly into her mouth. It’s disgusting. It’s water. It’s _ working. _ "Stop pretending." She hisses. "You just want to take my skin off, stop pretending you want _ me _." 

John tilts his head. "You asked for an adult conversation."

"So I get a liar."

"Liar." His thin mask cracks. He produces a chair from behind her and sits. "Liar_ , Temperance. _ That's a heavy stone for you to cast. Children get the truth. They _ suffer _ the truth. But adults, well, we lie. We fill ourselves with filth and deception. You asked me to lie to you, Temperance." He sounds so _ disappointed. _ For a moment Temperance is sorry, so sorry, sorry like she was at her Grandfather’s knee when she lost her rosary for the fourth time. She’s so _ fucking _ sorry she starts to cry. Tears well and as they do the _ need _to be sorry falls away. Her back begins to numb. 

"Do people know what to say to you?" she says, incredulous. "Do you just front up with that and see what happens?"

"Stay on track." He taps her on the nose. "You can't charm your way out of this." 

It's not time yet. It is not time, yet. So she just starts talking. He talks back.

He did have a genuinely charming way of making every conversation sound like a pleasant diversion you should want to participate in. Even when he was actually just threatening you with shit he'd follow through on. A skill she'd seen perfected, for sure, but never quite so aimlessly used. It was the lack of aim that made it charming. 

God. She was so fucked. 

"No, I get it." John leant forward in his chair and slapped his knees. "You're just like us. You know what is to be Faith, to be used. Why else have all those white dresses and etiquette classes? You know what it's like to be me, to hurt. Poor girl, to live with so much violence around you. You know what it's like to be Jacob, to be moulded to another's use and discarded. My dear, no one should have ever offered you up as a prize _bitch_, you’re so much _ more _than that. That's why Joseph wants you. You're our mirror."

She hears something on _ ours, _ something flutters in her, feathers on her back. That _ ours _means too much.

"And what am I carrying of Middlest? I have taken my shirt off a fair bit."

John scowls. "Don't you _ know _?"

Fair point to Littlest. "Pretty sure my Hot-Crazy scale would be a little more efficient." John raises an eyebrow. "Means I kinda think your brother's hotter." _ Or that you’re less insane. _

He laughs at her.

“This is a good start Temperance. Before we adjourn for the day, though, I must check the results of our previous meeting.”

He pulls at the front of her shirt and looks down. He slaps her. 

“Where is it?” John snarls. “Where is your sin?”

She blacks out for a moment and comes hurtling back with blood in her mouth. "Is that a theological proposition Mr Lawyer or-”

“Your scar.” John's hands flex and close on her skin. “Where is your scar.”

Rook looks down at her own chest where Wrath has bleed out ink. The letters are still there but it’s worn down and blown out, like the artist was incompetent. She’s watched it for days and days, her skin unwilling to hold his accusation. His assumption.

“Don’t have any.” 

“Everyone does.” John hisses. “You’re only _ human. _”

She doesn’t answer him. 

"Well then." He jerks away to grab at his tools, his tattoo gun and his knives. "We'll do this again." 

A popping noise comes from the general direction of her pack. From her drink can. "No, John, I think you and I are done."

The miniature explosive goes off and gas fills the air. They’re down in three, two, one...

\--

"Starting fee is fifty in this club." She comes down to the ground, puts her back on the pole and flicks her legs up. Eventually, she climbs to the top and does some truly graceful shit to get down again. 

"Do you truly enjoy this?" Joseph leans back in the plush chair that her employer has so kindly supplied and irregularly deep-cleaned. He looks pensive in his black suit and yellow glasses. 

She doesn't dignify that with an answer.

The club when she started working was called Paul’s Pole’s and rebranded some three months into _ Serenity, _ not that she ever called it that _ . _She’d gone home for a weekend in the vain hope that six months was enough to dull Diligence’s death, Kindness's disappearance, to a duller ache. She’d been wrong, of course. Hope springs and all that. When she came in to cover a shift the wooden booths had been done over in soft easy-clean faux velvet in dark pink. The tables had been replaced with sleek fake dark wood. Fresh flowers sat in the entrance and real plants in pots just ready to have alcohol and semen dumped on them. It had been edging tacky until they go to the three stages, at which it blew right past tacky into absurd. For some reason, Paul had backlit it so the pole was always four degrees warmer than anywhere else in the club. The pole was an absurd copper colour to match exactly none of the high shine gold fixtures. The lights were all coloured, so even in the middle of the day, your conversation felt seedy.

Honest, Joseph Seed, Herald of the Great Word sitting in the two pump chump seat of a strip club in the middle of the day was almost worth whatever judgement she was going to get for it. 

She comes to lay on her back, ass against the bottom of the pole, crosses her legs up the length. Her short shimmery dress pools on her stomach. “I’ve seen your true form,” Temperance says. 

“I’ve seen your full name,” Joseph replies.

And isn't that a fucking non-starter. 

"So how are we going to do this?" She leans up on her elbows, arches her back, grinds back down: the Joe in the corner has Wall Street pockets. The pole is braced by her weight but the silky material of her lilac dress is going up and up and up. She lies down again, tiles her head back to look him in the eye. "Are you going to lure me in with a promise of safety? Of love? Tell me the world is full of bad things but you've got the cure? The answer? I don't know, Joseph, seems like you might have to try a different angle." She flows off the floor and onto her knees in front of him. "I grew up in a cult."

"Confession."

"Of a kind." One she’s denying John at this very moment. "I admit, I _ have _been trained to follow a charismatic man saying he has the good word on his side."

His eyebrow goes up. 

She leans up and over the edge, knees holding her weight, chest forward. "You're competing for space." 

“I meant yours, Merciful Temperance.” He says, amused. “Your confession. There’s still time.”

“No. There’s not.” All around them the scene is ending. It won’t matter to him but the bartender is wiping down the counters. Susan has hopped down from the little stage to help close the backrooms, the fringing on her thong swinging over her ass. Bobby, Paul’s nephew, has brought out the big disinfectant even though just a little while ago it was empty on a Tuesday afternoon. Temperance swings around so she’s all but tucked on his lap. He doesn’t oblige her with a grip just braces lean thighs beneath her own. They slide together, chest to chest, groin to groin, so she takes the grip on his stupid little man-bun and _ pulls. _ “Don’t forgive me.”

She puts her hand on his ribs and pushes through skin to reach his heart. Crossed wires in a dream. She squeezes down. 

\--

This is the shitpile. 

Sharky swims above her in little dawn coloured lights. He swallows.“Oh, fuck. Po-Po.”

“It’s better than it looks, Charlemagne.” She sits up, body screaming hellfire, but it’s been twenty minutes now. The skin on her back may still be nothing to write home about but the deep injuries are already lessening. “Did you get it?”

Sharky holds up an honest to god _ briefcase. _ “Yeah, it was where our, er, informant said it would be. Took a look inside to make sure but it ain’t about fire so it might as well be Greek to me but I recognise enough of the symbols and shit to know it’s _ something _. Are you sure you’re okay to do this? I liked Joey as much as anyone but you’re real banged up.”

“Yeah, honey, I’m good.” She adds the endearment for the blush across his nose. To remind herself that she’s still got it, even with John Seed all over her body. “Let’s get to it.”

One day, Rook knew, she was going to have to pull Josephine “Firecracker” Hudson out of the fire. She knew this when they first met. She knew this at the Christmas party when Rook went home with a trucker and Joey drove her to the clinic two days later. She knew this six months ago when Rook cried her heart out in the car after a domestic violence incident that involved a six-year-old girl who was mostly bones and sweet eyes. She knew this. She always fucking knows this. 

She stands. “Shirt, Sharky.” She swallows the bile and the blood that wants to come out.

“Are you sure-?”

“Shirt. Then make sure no one else gets in.” 

Sharky’s face is pale. Paler than his ass, even. And she’s seen his ass. 

Rook laughs to herself. 

“What?” Sharky asks. “What is it?”

“Thinking about your ass.” Rook keeps giggling until it turns to coughs.

Sharky hisses. “You can’t do this.”

“Take a look at my face, Sharky, I know you’ve seen it.” She tilts her head from side to side. “My lip still bleeding? No? I’m not as badly hurt as I seem. Go on.” 

Charlemagne Boshaw hates seeing her hurt. He may even genuinely want to be her best friend. Some part of her wants that for herself: Sharky Boshaw and his ridiculous motormouth, mega into her because she reminds him of Sarah Connor, but for how he actually doesn’t want to fuck her at all. But she is still herself. Mostly melted Ice Bitch and all. She gets the shirt off his back -gives him a low wolf whistle because he’s earned it- but she gets him out of John’s bunker. 

John got out before them, injured by the small explosion she’d packed with shrapnel. They should both be dead. Not her, really, but him. Maybe God really is on his side. 

She tumbles after his blood trail, face aching, legs protesting the lack of blood in her body. Above her the sounds of pitched fighting increase. Shudders run through the walls. Temperance keeps walking. Around one bend, then two, then more and down some stairs, she follows the scent of blood. Her own face is welling with tears again, ones of pain. They slip down her cheeks and fall, golden, to the floor. At the end of an empty dark hallway, a door sits ajar. From where she stands she can hear a man telling a scared woman to _‘shut up, just shut up, did you _**_know?_**_’_. John and Joey. 

She pushes open the door. One bed and a shitty portable toilet. John sitting on the edge of the bed reaching for his gun. Joey cowering in the corner opposite to him. Temperance face keeps spilling over, she stretches her hands and feels them become a little bit more.

John lunges to tackle her. 

It feels like she’s underwater, or in a dream, or watching those deer all that time ago. Here and not here. Elsewhere. John leaps for her and she pushes him down. He should be able to topple her even if they’re nearly even in height. Her split lip stops hurting, her twisted ankle snaps back into place, she _ feels _her body ready itself. Not for John, but for the things he’s bringing down upon them all. 

“Stop fighting me, John.” Her voice is tinny and distant to her own ears. “You cannot win.”

He throws a punch. Temperance catches it in her own palm, presses down to get a good grip, then just pushes back. His shoulder snaps out of place. 

It's not that John is weak. Jacob is hard to get past because all he wants is annihilation. You give it to him or he crushes you. Even weeks into a shared space she's not certain what Joseph wants, just that it's inside other people and only accessible through the visceral reality of his hands in your head. John just needs things, without much clarity and therefore without much intent. You can give him everything: he'll lick it clean and start unknitting universal constants for another hit. That is scary enough on its own. Scary enough to Joey who is a Woman of Intention. Not scary enough to Temperance who lives with her own subjectivity all the time, not just when some man wants to take it from her. 

She gets a good grip on him, twists so that she has her arm barred around his throat and leverages it. She feels his body struggle for air but hers is stronger. The body is awake. She puts her mouth to his ear and does what she feels Joseph must-have, the first time in a long time when they met as fully grown men with demons aplenty behind them.

(_ It was never your fault _ ) ( _ they took advantage _ ) ( _ I can see you, you know, and there is something _ ** _glorious _ ** _ inside _ ) ( _ but there is nothing but worm meat around it _ ) ( _ you have to be better, John, be better, love them _)

“Isn’t that what he told you?” Merciful Temperance, Junior Deputy of Hope County, the Sinner, says, “Isn’t that what he told you I’d say when this ‘mirroring’ started? Did he tell you what he is?” _ And what I must be, as a counterargument? _

John passes out. Temperance sighs and lets the body drop. Joey is huddled in the corner, the duct tape across her mouth grimy at the edges. When Rook goes to pull it off Joey shudders with fear. Rook swallows her own sorrow, leaves the tape and gets on her knees to slide weakening fingers between the metal. Once the metal is off and red blood drips from her hands Joey looks at her again. She presses hands to her shoulders and pulls her into a sobbing hug, ripping the duct tape off.

“I thought,” Joey whimpers into her bloody hair, “I thought you’d _ left _me. I thought I was alone.” 

Temperance hugs her back. This is the shitpile. 

She drags John Seed behind her by the ankle, body cussing her out all the way, but he can’t be left here and passed out is the safest he’s ever been. As they leave the bunker Joey gets her spark back, that hotblooded thing that Rook always hated, gets right inside and makes her grab a gun on the way out. She arcs towards the outside leaving John and Rook behind. In any other situation she’d be _ pissed _about it. Rook stops at some stairs near the outside puts her hands on her knees and just breathes.

Without his spirit to overwhelm him John Seed is just another handsome man in nice clothes. His tattoos are novel but not extraordinary, his intellect is incisive but wrapped in a fallible temper, his words are good but she’s had better. She stands by the Capricorn thing, actually, an abysmal time in bed. 

She should kill him. She really should. The world would keep spinning and maybe Joseph Seed would understand just a little bit better what he was fucking around with. What he was pushing her into fucking around with. That trick with the water was _ inspired, _if she’d been just a little different, if he’d had enough time, she’d have fallen hard and fast. She’d have been just another broken toy and John would skip into paradise. The Seeds continue to crack seals in her, make her cry and scream and dream. He should really just die.

She pulls his own gun off him and lines up. 

“Hey, ah Dep?” Sharky calls from the top of the stairs. “We’re about done here. Hurk’s got the truck waiting.”

The moment breaks. John is just another John, he’s Duncan all those years ago, someone that Rook just deep down _ pitied. _She kicks John to the side, out of Sharky's line of sight, and leaves him to bruise up. There'd been thoughts of killing him, real deep longings to, but at the end of the day what Rook wanted to be was merciful. So she shuts the bunker door. She gets into the truck bed and lets Joey cuddle close. 

She leaves him there to rot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things this chapter was meant to have: all of the Seeds, a lot of Jacob. What this chapter has: John Seed's needy, needy ass taking up so much space. Holy shit. 
> 
> This chapter took so long I had a birthday. Happy Birthday, me. 
> 
> It also took so long I was approached by an actual IRL cult, not the first time, but still noteworthy.


	4. By The Time That You Told Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> last night you came to kiss me in a dream but when i  
woke  
what kind of foolishness is this breathe out a lungful  
of your smoke

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutout to my city which has the worst air pollution in the world right now please donate to the fires haha we're so fucked

She goes to the Whitetails. Not because they need her. Tammy, not a fan when Rook was rocking up to follow a lead on a kid caught up in his parents' oxy addiction unknowingly carrying where his mother had put her stash to hide it from her husband, was even less of one when she rocked up wild-eyed having left a man to die. 

And again, Temperance, who even after the shitpile had no time for women who got hot with fury when slighted. Got in your face with the shit they'd just have to deal with themselves. Not even after putting Joey “Firecracker” Hudson into Jerome's arms herself. No fucking time. 

Eli thinks she's _ hot _ and hot shit but he's paranoid enough to just leave her the fuck alone about it when she starts hunting Jacob's Chosen the same way she hunted Angels. People call her _ Rook _ not _ Temperance _ because these people don’t love her, they just need her and she can live like that. During the nights that she isn’t with Joseph ( _ isn’t his _), she walks through John’s bunker, his voice in the near distance. Yellow will drip through the ceiling and splatter on the floor. Something old awake but not present with open eyes. Not yet. 

It's fine. It's alright. It's fine.

Eli is smart enough, old hat at trauma enough, to _ make _her call home once a day. To Sharky or the Rye's. Not Mary May because she's got Joey and Joey is now scared of her, but everyone else. 

"Lindsey has it he said to tell you, uh," Nick says a lot of chemistry nonsense haltingly and Rook isn't good enough to not laugh at him about it, "screw you, Temp."

"Love you, too, Rye." Nick splutters back at her. "Get a piece of paper and tell him this, back." 

Days in the mountains run on Eli’s time. She gets up, stretches, does inventory, dodges people who have thanks or wants on their breath, eats, hunts, sleeps. Every sixteen hours they split into three groups and deploy: Hunters, Gatherers, Bait. Eli divines Jacob’s motivations and movements through what Rook knows was a good, solid, deep friendship that snapped clean before the Reaping. It hurts him, she knows, to have to use love for survival. Sometimes she thinks about telling him that she knows, understands what it is to have love and terror and grief wind down the same rope, under the same skin. 

Rook is a Hunter, primarily. She reacts to violence without thinking, her injuries are always less than they should be, she is starting to forget tiredness. Sometimes she’s Bait but on one rotation she played possum and cut a meaty swath into Jacob’s resources from up and around the river. Jacob has half the antibiotics he needs to keep his Chosen functioning but Eli had to drop a safehouse when the wolves came swarming. Rook, smartly, doesn’t say that she could probably make Jacob non-viable in two weeks if he’s stretched as tightly as it seems. It’s too important to Eli, to both of them, to think that they’re fighting each other.

Nick calls back while Rook is still tacky with blood. “He thinks it’s in the water. They grew the source in some really funky water.” Rook_ hmms _ as she rubs a dirty towel from elbow to wrist. “Lindsey says that-” Nick sighs. “Here’s the incomprehensible gibberish, no, fuck that, this is so- The Bliss is a narcotic and he thinks they produce some weird liquid on their surface which was weaponised. There. That’s it. Fucking _ doctors _.”

She and Lindsey are close to a breakthrough. From John’s notes, they know how the Bliss does what it does. If they can get just a bit more information. Well, game over Seeds. Dutch can blow them up during Sunday brunch. 

The pattern holds for nearly a month. Hunter, Bait. Hunter, Bait. John is in recovery, spiralling as he loses his grip on the Valley and therefore his sense of self. Faith is spinning out too for some reason. A bee in her bonnet that’s made her unhappy with having the others in her territory. Jacob- Well, Jacob is playing catch up. Jacob takes people even from his siblings but he still needs _ them _ to maintain control so _ he _doesn’t lose footholds on the borders. Eli doesn’t like that Rook has a merchants eye for supply lines and finding the one thing that if removed from play will cause a fuck up no amount of iron command can undo. He finds it skeevy, suspicious. Who is she to look at this mess and see how it works? He doesn’t fucking like it, but he will use it. So Rook plays Hunter-Bait and keeps the Whitetails moving. 

Rook goes with the Gatherers exactly once. The day she gets caught. 

\--

It starts easy enough. Jacob tries to kill her.

Rook doesn’t die though. She dries out, she gets cocky, but she stays more or less alive. All cages are made the same, walls and doors and people making you stay in them. Coaches, parents, teachers, lovers, all guards in their way. Rook sinks into herself and while her dreams get yellower and yellower the room gets redder and redder. 

Jacob comes out of the dark. His music box is in his palm.“You went after _ my brother. _” 

Rook has her cheek pressed to the dirty floor, body twisted and relaxed to allow it. "Not like I killed him." 

"No." Jacob turns thoughtful. About John, maybe. More like the way she doesn’t care about the piss smell all over the place. "You left him to bleed out. Make you mad didn't he?" Jacob leans down on admittedly phenomenal legs. He reaches through his own bars and pulls her head up by her hair. 

Rook blinks, thinking _ yellow-yellow. _"I don't care about John, Jacob."

Jacob’s grip tightens. "Do you care about Joseph?"

She pulls on his grip. "It's Stockholm's."

Jacob nods. "He's like that."

“He loves you though.”Joseph combing her hair in her airy white bedroom in the O’Hare mansion, _ I think he’s a man of honour, _ and Rook lying on her stomach, saying in kind, _ I always thought Charity was the smartest, to figure out what Maman wanted and how to give it to her. _“You should tell him you know that.”

A rumbling noise shakes his chest. Laughter. “It’s like you’re _ trying _to get beat.”

"I just feel it would be a lot easier on everyone else if you all just talked more." Rook pulls her hair out of his grip. "Therapy."

He hums. “Well. This will have to do.” He opens the music box 

_ Red-Red, _ Rook thinks. _ Yellow-Yellow. _

\--

The gun has six bullets, this time. Six bullets, seven targets. At the end she has blood slicked palms. She went for the eyes like he did. Jacob frowns but can’t fault her.

("The first man I ever fell in love with was like you," she gets out, day three in the Red. "Always believed him, just a little.”

Joseph is shirtless in his own kitchen. He looks very fucking surprised.) 

The knife is dull. Rook manages to lose it in a man’s skull. She finds a length of chain and aims for the joints. She’s weak and shaky but when she hits it's with the strength of Jacob himself. 

Jacob raises an eyebrow.

(The music at this party is loud _ and _ bad. Her drink is spiked but fuck it, she’s here to get a date to take home, she’ll get that fucker next time. She’s here for someone her mother would _ really _ have something to say about. Someone kind, or cruel, someone who has a beating, bloody heart that can’t be ignored. Scarlett hates loud things. She likes to feel safe. Another drink appears in her hand. It tastes...white. White like floral perfume. White like lilies at a funeral. White like bones in the ground. She says thank you and the man smiles, eyes blue behind _ yellow yellow _)

Jacob gives her poison to drink and tells her to white knuckle it. He stands with a bottle of drugged water for Rook’s closing throat when she’s done and dead on her feet, brain, blood and guts sliding around. Nails split and weeping. Teeth wet with- He wipes her down himself. Hands ghosting over her skin intimate but disinterested. Like she’s a gun. A beautiful knife. 

(She's tracing him in his dreams -her nightmares, she knows about the Bliss now, knows it's something that can only be contained. What does she know? She knows that she knows. She follows his back through the fields and trees, tall grasses and bubbling babbling water. He has seeds in his hands and a shovel, a wide lipped shovel with a star on it. He picks his spot and shatters the earth with purpose. He digs down and he digs deep, the dirt does not stay still, then he takes his knife and cuts his hand. His blood goes into the dirt and she remembers that the first fallen came in shades of light, the Bliss that makes Angels-)

It’s a curse in the end. That harm slides off Rook like water on sealed roofs. There is no proof on the outside. No way to measure the red eating the yellow. Eating away at her hard-bitten grip on what she is. Rook doesn’t lie to herself: she has nothing. Rook can no longer know if this is the truth. 

(_ Get out Temperance, _ Joseph says, of all things, _ I can’t prevent what he’ll do to you. Can you hear me? Don’t let him get all the way through. I don’t know which one of you would survive _)

“Good,” Jacob says, at some point. “One more thing.”

Rook blinks. One eye then the other. Her breath is even and so slow she might register as dead. Her thoughts are almost off-line. Slow and distinct enough to register as abstraction. _ It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October _ ... _ In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit _ ... _ Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice...In the beginning, God created... _One blink. Then another. Then an opening line. Then a breath. Then a blink. Then a line...

Jacob opened the door impatient in the way he only was with his weapons. Things he trusted to obey and never hurt him back. A man walked through the door his posture turning from contrite, weak, fearful to stubborn and strong unevenly. Broken, but done wrong, so the pieces never separated and settled into the long black ocean Rook was more than familiar with. Stuck in the agony of _ red _and never into the blissed-out nothingness of being just a knife; handled well and kept clean. Pity, she felt pity for that. 

“This is what I wanted you to see,” Jacob says to the weak man. “Joseph was sure she shouldn’t see _ you _ until it was all over. Didn’t want to come down himself. Didn’t want her to interact with anyone, didn’t want me to Bliss her. Joe almost never gets shirty with me but this? Her?” Jacob whistles. “What was it? You dating? Did you _ want _ that peaches?” His tone is mocking and edgy. This matters to him, why? “Come on. Let’s go see _ Rook. _”

Rook stays still. Quiet. Settled. Ready to be violent. Ready to be pleasant.

Jacob drags the man to where Rook is sitting, quiet, in her cage. The man shuffles over, hunched, and all her instincts have marked him down. She knows men like this: weak and full of knives. His hair is lank and curling, darker than hers which has seen the sun more recently. His skin is patchy and washed out, unhappy. Still, he’d be nice enough to look at, she wouldn’t hate it. The man kneels to see her, eyes clouded. He makes eye contact direct sight refocusing from the inside, cynically looking at the clean shirt and stained pants, her bruised knuckles. His eyes move to her hair, the curve of her cheekbone. The lanky _ still _ chemical destroyed hair on her head. Sharp focus comes into the man’s eyes spinning from disinterest to calculation to horror. To out and out _ fear. _ Rook tips her head a little, a nice angle for her and keeps steady even breathes. He’s young. Younger than her. Young enough to put pressure on but too old to get thick enough quick enough. If they give him a few years...

_ I’m going to call you Rook, for Rookie. _ Like he had the range. _ Asshole! Asshole, asshole. Asshole! _

_ Playing stupid on the side of the road with a gun. With Jacob Seed. When the world was... _

The nebulous future she’d almost imagined, where she waited four or five years for Staci to work it all out and they maybe got a little house together closer to town, goes up in smoke. Jacob has killed that dream by remaking Staci. Rook has killed it by being herself. 

Something hot and vicious rolls up her body. She keens over, vomits. Her body shudders and wrenches itself around. Her back arches. Her shoulders go to meet her spine. She vomits some more. Tears, hot and white roll over her cheeks-

**SOMETHING DOESN'T BELONG IN HERE**

-she can’t keep it in. She can’t keep it in. It’s Staci, her friend, her friend who she came here for. Who she made deals with Nancy for. Red turns green-blue. “Staci-”

Staci flinches. _ Jacob _flinches. Goes right for the music box. 

Cull the (-Kindness’s diary, in the aftermath, _ HELPMEET HELPMEET HELPMEAT HELPMEETHELP HELPMEAT HELP ME ME MEAT HELP- _ ) **ONLY YOU**

“Stop doing that.” Rook turns her crying eyes to the box. “Stop. Stop. St-”

“You shouldn't have come for me,” whispers Staci as Jacob starts the music. Staci glances at the box with calculation and...approval. “I promise you Temperance. Everything will be alright.”

(IT'S COMING IT'S COMING IT'S COLLAPSING HELP TEMPERANCE HELP TEMPERANCE HELP TEMPERANCE HELP TEMPERANCE THE COLLAPSE HELP ME HELP HELP over and over again, Kindness in her walled away room, calling (HELPMATE HELPMEET HELP**MEAT) **and the sister she could never be. Never. No matter how hard she cried or fought. Something was always wrong with Kindness and that wrongness got out, got loud, got mixed up-) 

“Easy, down you go deputy.” Jacob croons. Like she’s a dog. A beautiful knife and nothing else. “We have work yet.” He seems pleased and so she is too. She has practice, being pleased at her own subjugation. Her grandfather and the slam of his cane against the ground, the sound that made everyone _ stop. _ She’s going to smile about it, later. _ Only You, _ and all that. _ Raise a glass to Virtue. _

(WHY ME AND NOT HER WHY ME AND NOT HER WHY MAKE ME STRONG AND NOT HER IT WASN’T FAIR IT ISN’T FAIR OF YOU TO MAKE HER WRONG/BEAUTIFUL FROM THE START SHE COULDN’T FIGHT WHY MAKE ME AND NOT HER)

Rook smiles. She dries her eyes. She goes hunting Whitetails. 

\--

She used to watch Diligence do this thing when simply being too horrifying to deny didn’t work for her. She’d touch her own skin, step close, and touch whoever it was that she was meant to be seducing. It was like they felt the warmth of her and immediately dropped a white flag. Patience had a version with a wine glass and an a-line modest skirt. Even Chastity, the sweet sister, could make a patsy out of a handbag and an embarrassed smile. Rook doesn’t have her lipstick on her or her heel on a pole but she knows that it can be done. All men are supplantable with the right pressure. That’s what makes the rest of it _ bearable. _

**SOMETHING DOESN’T BELONG IN HERE**

Jacob makes that all untrue.

**ARE YOU LISTENING? SOMETHING DOESN’T BELONG**

It goes wrong when she clears the Whitetails safety line. When she crawls down Eli's bunker ladder and takes her steps two at a time. Injured and crazed but not _ red. Obviously not. _ They let her stay because mostly, people want to give her what she wants. She's fine until she's alone and his _ voice _comes out of the radio. 

She doesn’t use the gun even though the crawling madness makes it a better option. There are just so many targets. Her and him and wolves and they all have to die. They have to _ die. _ They have to stop. The music. Maybe the next one will make it stop. The next dead target will make it _ stop- _

_ Stop. _

Her knife goes halfway into Eli’s neck.

She looks at the phantom of Jacob Seed. There is blood dripping into her mouth, Eli’s blood. She’s staring at the phantom made of _ Only You _and there is nothing, not Mercy, not Temperance, not even Wrath in the room with her. 

Tammy shrieks, "No!" But the deed is half done and Eli is choking on his own blood. 

\--

So John burns down her house.

That's the first thing they say to her after she comes off the mountain. _ John burnt your house down. _ She's honestly stumped for a moment because sure she literally ripped his shoulder out and choked him but _ burning her house down? _That's such a bunny boiler d-list movie response.

The next thing is a question: _ Did you kill Jacob? _

No. No, she did not. She left Eli half dead and ran. A failure yet again.

"I mean," she tries to explain, "I can't do anything about it now?"

"I'm so sorry," Kim says.

"We'll get him back." Nick clasps her shoulder meaningfully. 

"No. Really. I don't care." She insists. "It was a place I kept stuff. That's it." 

"Homes are important," Nick stresses.

Rook has no idea what face she makes just that it makes Nick hiss. 

Kim is a savvier beast. “Are you okay, Temperance?”

On reflex, she offers a wry, “Of course. The detox clearly worked,” she gestures to her too-thin body. “The results speak for themselves.”

Kim frowns.

Rook tries again. Smiles. “Why wouldn’t I be?” 

\--

She's just lost her husband.

Rook kneels on the empty stretch of road. "Don't pretend to care."

Joseph leans down to brush the gravel off her knees. Her anniversary dress is shimmery blue and tight across her bust, flattering to the waist she keeps trim as part of the unspoken deal of her _ late _marriage. The excess fabric is pooled around her legs, ripped and dirty. His hand comes to rub soothingly across the skin on her exposed back, callused, firm strokes. 

He deliberates, but he was here for the argument, watching her act out a memory she can’t avoid. Out of kindness, or perhaps malice, equal emotions for him, he changes the subject. “Jacob is upset.” His hand moves to cup her neck over the golden clasp of the dress. His hand makes the metal uncomfortably warm.“You were meant to complete your Trials.”

“You told me to leave.”

“I told you to not let him see you.” He counters. “You scared me for a moment, Temperance. I thought I might lose one of you.” Joseph adjusts his white shirt, black vest combination. Strangely appropriate for the occasion, although perhaps not as a guest. He seems to notice too, given the wry smile. 

“Did you know which one you wanted it to be?”

“I want you both in Eden. _ Both _of you deserve salvation.”

Rook leans into that belief for a moment, then she picks up the wedding ring she’d thrown at Dylan when he called her _ unfaithful. _ They’d been arguing and then Dylan reached out to her and she felt tears begin to roll down her face. They’d _ burned _so fucking badly. He had a right to be mad. He didn’t know about Kindness, let alone that she’d been let out to come to this party. He’d been fine with Rufus O’Hare when he gave advice and introductions. Fine with Scarlett when he’d gone behind her back and invited her to Thanksgiving last year. Not fine with Virtue and what it meant for his career if he stayed attached to her. She took Virtue on the chin, even though she’d been stripping when they met, even though she’d greased his career by simply knowing how to behave, but he could only accuse her of things she’d actually done. 

She’d omitted information sure, but she had never, ever been unfaithful. So fuck it! Throw the ring! Throw the heels! He’d been running for his car by the end. Hopefully, she’d marked the stupid shiny finish. 

Joseph helps her up and they hobble back to her mother’s huge white stone house. There are huge arrangements of white and blue flowers in expensive vases. She pulls him away from the door and around the side. One of the windows is slightly ajar. She pushes it open and climbs in turning to help Joseph in after her. 

They’d commandeered one of her father’s offices when they came up here a month ago. Dylan’s work scatters across the wide oak desk, his laptop facing the wide windows they’d climbed in. Dylan’s paraphernalia on the shelves trying to disguise how uncomfortable the ten-foot tall ceilings and rare books made him. Rookmperance had never quite understood how intimidated her new money husband was by her until they’d spent the summer in this house. 

She kneels by the desk and pulls out a spare glass, fills it with whiskey and wipes down a tray to put it on. She scans his calendar and organises his notes for him. Sits down to read his notes and correct mistakes. She did this every evening for six years. In the morning she made breakfast and collected their receipts. Lunch was prepped on Sunday’s so they could stay fit and on top of their weight. Thursday was her cheat day. Saturday was his. 

Joseph picks up her father’s well-thumbed bible from where it sits on top of a pile of similar texts. “Do you?” He drifts over with it to stand behind her.

Dylan will need half of these papers on Monday. She starts organising them. “Do I what?”

“Your workmates' desks. Do you tidy them?” Joseph thumbs through his book with interested eyes. 

_ Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. _

“You know what-” she starts on a snarl. Footsteps come by the door. She jumps up to clamp a hand over his mouth. “Quiet.”

The door creeps open. In the original memory, Scarlett found her weeping over a broken whiskey glass, trying to get her husband’s papers in order so he could divorce her. Scarlett had reared back, unhappy with the display of emotion, but she’s swallowed it down and been kind, for her. They’ve discovered that they don’t have to follow where the dreams take them so long as they go where they do. 

Scarlett O’Hare is in red, her long grey-blonde hair pulled back into a crown braid. Her brown eyes -the ones they share- scan the room but because Rook _isn’t _crying over broken glass she leans back and closes the door. Her mother disappears around the corner in a cloud of Jo Malone. 

Rook sighs in relief and pours herself another glass. 

Joseph takes it from her and places it back on the desk. He cages her in, close enough for her to smell the river and smoke smell on his skin. He sighs. "Why are you so keen to love people who don't love you?"

She blinks. That's certainly a Cult thesis, she supposes. Joseph Seed: _ why should I love what doesn't love me? Why should you love someone who isn't me, who loves you? _She can see the logic in it even if it is blinding presumptuous. Maybe Hope County doesn't love her but love is a keeping place, not a motivation. She comes home to love and she leaves it to fight. That he's removed the things she loves from what might have been home -Staci & Joey, the thin promise of law and order, her actual goddamn house- means that the fight has to be on all the time. 

"People don't have to love me for me to fight for them." Then adds for the part of him that sees love and obedience as the same thing. "People don't _ have _to love me at all." She slips out from under him and dashes for the back balcony.

The house is full of people and obscene wealth but instead of watching the poor preacher gwack and disapprove she climbs the ivy ringed staircase and goes for where Rufus O’Hare is waiting. 

In the original memory, she’d been tear-stained, bloody footed and a huge embarrassment to everyone. She’d been humiliated to be brought before him. Even now, in his old age, when he was frail and covered in blankets to keep off the ever-present shivers. She’d stubbornly refused to apologise for ruining the party. Said that Dylan could call her all kinds of things but _ unfaithful _ wasn’t one of them. Then she remembered that Kindness was downstairs and this man could, in truth, do so. Rufus O’Hare had looked her in the eye and said, "There is a reason, you are my favourite Temperance. A quality you have that your sisters lack. A light that will not go out." 

Rook knows her cues so she sits next to him. Not afraid of him. Not now that he’s dead. He’d kept his hair even as it thinned. Kept it long. His dinner suit is green as his eyes and pressed with cologne thick enough to ward off the scent of his decaying body. He’s not strong anymore, not in mind or body, but there are flashes of thunder that say it’s all still there. That you can’t rest easy yet. Her grandfather grips her chin tightly. "You have a capacity for vengeance that humbles me. Use it well." 

Rook had gone to change and then to battle with Charity and Patience over whose party it was, exactly, and yes she _ could _ end her anniversary party if her husband screamed _ I want a divorce! _from his car as he drove away. In this version, she tucks her arm in Josephs and leads him back to the study. He lets her have the drink, this time. 

"He loves you," Joseph says, with admiration.

"Loved."

_ Everything you love can die. _ Rook hears the Virtue Bible in her head. _ So you should love bitterly, with closed hands. Everything ends in bitterness. _She looks at him far too close to her. His eyes are blue, of course. No neutralizer here in their shared illness. His mouth is hanging open just the slightest bit and-

And Rook, bitten by curiosity. 

“We can’t keep doing this,” she whispers. “I’m too smart for this.”

He grows piercing at the weakness. “You only have to-”

“Shut up, Joe.” She drinks her whiskey. “For now. Consider Wrath gone for the night.”

“And what are you without it?” She can see the turn of him, ready to twist this vulnerability to empathy. To finding him and his cause. She supposes now is as good a time as any. “This place is poison Temperance. Hereditary and beautiful, but still poison.”

She answers the actual question. “Tired. You get far on anger. Not so much on tired.” She reaches over to touch him; he’s come close again. “Genuine question: why weren't you wearing a shirt? All your other siblings were fully dressed."

Joseph takes a long time to think about it. Long enough Rook begins to feel like he's got a sense of humour under there. The whole time she keeps her hand gently against his abdomen. "I think they were all in the wash."

Ass.

"And the vest? And the jacket? And anything you might wear when not preaching?"

Rook spreads her fingers. The muscles under her hand twitch."The Lord’s work is never done."

"Liar." She removes the hand and tips back to look him in the eyes. “What will it to make you stop?”

He says, very seriously, “The end of the world.”

By now he’s drifted between her legs, despite himself probably. Rook cages him in like he did her.

His eyes narrow. Two peas in a pod, them: hard to weaponise intimacy against.“We never meet in my dreams. Why is that?”

Rook raises a brow. “Because you don’t have dreams.”

Red ash on a red background. Red in the sky and in the hollows of smashed down trees. Red on the ground and green bleeding out of the grass. Red in his mouth from screaming. The sign to Falls End is sheared off its stumps, the roads broken. There is glass embedded in his feet from walking. His island is alone in a sea of it, the red, yes, but also the blackening decay of the unknown future. The one that is made certain by the blooming fire-y sky. The signs are incomprehensible. Every meaning and every person erased by the sheer destruction. There is nothing and the nothing is completely red.

She tips her glass. “There’s whiskey in my dreams.” 

He stills. Then, like a viper, rips the drink from her hand and flings it across the room. He leverages his barely superior weight until she’s on her back, skirt up near her thighs suddenly aware that she’s barefoot. The heat of him grows intense as he leans over her, his knee on the desk to give him the reach. The ceiling disappears, the party. All there is in the universe is his eyes.

Joseph cups her cheeks "Is this really who you are?_ All _ that you are? May Merci-"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RIP IN PEACE STACI-WITH-AN-I YOU WERE A REAL ONE
> 
> So anyway, I wrote a Nice AU side piece to this and the summary should be up and here is what I need from you, gentle readers: WHAT DOES STACI PRATT'S DICK LOOK LIKE
> 
> The pacing of this is so off at this point but I'm forgiving myself because it has just been a hellish two weeks and the fire season goes till, like, April now.
> 
> Shoutout to my city which has the worst air pollution in the world right now please donate to the australian fire relief haha we're so fucked eat shit scomo


	5. I Alone Am The Answer, I Alone Will Set Wrongs Right

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> but in order to root out the cancer, its got to be kept from the sunlight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woof I have had this finished for days but AO3 wanted me to format by hand I will absolutely fucking not do that, you can't make me. Thanks for coming with me on this journey as my first official foray into this fandom. Please read the note at the end for further news on where we go next. 
> 
> There might a few clarity edits. I deleted a few scenes for being way too dark or what I thought was clarity but I might put them back in. 
> 
> Also, I can finally, finally stop listening to the Decemberists.

If this is what being a soldier is Jacob was right. She isn't one.

Temperance wakes up with whiskey lingering in her mouth. Rook is in the red but Temperance is here, awake, with whiskey on her lips. Fuck him, for giving her name back to her.

She rolls up on to her knees. It doesn’t just taste like whiskey. It feels like she really did drink three glasses of Macallan’s 35. They weren’t subtle glasses either. She drops down into child’s pose and breathes in the scent of Nick Rye’s terrible laundry powder. Although coming out of the dream of her mother's house maybe she’s just being kind of a snob? She takes another still inhale. No. Bad. She trusts Kim to like nice things. Maybe she only trusts Nick to love Carmina. And Kim. And Hope. 

There’s something crackling in a pan beyond the door. Rock music in a busted CD player she and Sharky liberated from Peggie hands a month and more ago. Food and the sound of Nick’s low laugh. Too deep for him, she gets how it convinced a solid catch like Kim. 

Rook rolls onto her feet and puts Temperance back on in the mirror. Kim, the sweetheart, left an old tube of lipstick. Not the right colour, her or Kim, but it’s red enough to work. 

The small family table is set for three. Temperance takes a seat next to Nick and drinks Kim’s weak, awful chamomile. Nick looks at her and says, “Faith.”

“Well shit.” Temperance downs her tea. 

\--

If this is being a soldier than Jacob was right: she isn’t one.

Hunting she can do. Eyes closed, arms tied behind her back. Faith can be hunted. So it’s what she’ll do. The Henbane stretches out in a hyperactive mockery of her blue-green memory. At this level, even she can get caught in the Bliss. It sings her eyes and halts her lungs. Makes her feel overwhelmed in a not unpleasant way. It feels like she is always just moments from revelation. From reaching  _ something.  _ Her sober half, as minuscule and getting more so as it is, speaks directly from her mirror-memory of Joseph here, planting the first seeds. Temperance cuts her hand and lets the blood pool in her palm, pulling her forward. 

Into the Bliss she goes with her knife out. The shimmer intensifies and melds the already beautiful landscape into an impressionist heaven. The strong, steady trees become quick lines on a canvas, their canopies perfect representations in a pastel palette. Temperance really, deeply hates the romanticism of this aesthetic and holds on to her irritation at the tackiness of all  _ four  _ Seed siblings as a salve against her closing throat. The Bliss is a fucking  _ bitch  _ of a thing. 

Temperance wades into the water. There’s a cross-examining of sensations here: she can feel the hard rush of a bloated river pulling her to her death. At the same time, her eyes tell her that the water is tepid. Gentle.  _ Fragile.  _

Temperance snorts. Leave it to Faith to live in a metaphor. 

Temperance wades out into the current trusting her blood to keep her moored in the here and now, enough not to drown. The ground rises to meet her feet, the drift eases and she feels the rise of an island. She’s soaked. Her gun is gone. Which leaves just her knife. And herself. Never forgetting  _ that  _ now, no thanks to Jacob Seed. She pulls off her shirt and dries off her hair. She pulls her pants and shoes off too, checking that a nearby tree is real so she can hang them up to dry. Around the tree, a ring of flowers grows that’s so pointed that Temperance doesn’t even have time to think about Alice and Wonderlands. 

She follows her path through the flowers. "Faith. I'd really like to speak to you."

Faith startles, swings around. "How-?" She’s preparing something on a table. Her mind would  _ love  _ to say it was harmless but she knows better. It’s papers. Markings written in red all over. One huge  _ I’m Sorry  _ over a whole paragraph. Temperance isn’t close enough to see if it’s what they’re here for. Not from here.

The wood-river disappears. Temperance finds herself in a shed with Faith, her hand healed and pink-skinned. She flexes it to check. Faith is in her dress and a jacket. Her eyes are hollow and unkind. Skin pink and fletched with dirty scratches.  _ Someone,  _ she thinks,  _ is having a bad high.  _ It makes Faith look her age: younger than Temperance. Faith’s scars don’t heal. Don’t prioritise an unblemished surface over everything. She knows that by the scars that have thickened over Faith’s ankles. 

"What is this stuff really?" With her unharmed hand she waves around their heads. “How’d you make it?”

Faith jerks. Slowly, dully, she reaches for a nearby metal bar. She swings with quite some purpose. Temperance is proud of her when she rips it from her hands and throws it, hard, to embed halfway into the concrete floor. Cracks form and spread out between them. 

"No," Faith wails, "not you too. There can't be  _ two  _ like you."

Temperance gives her a thoroughly bemused look. 

"You know?" Then she shakes her head. "Of course you do. He knows-" how it happens, it happened to him after all. "Were they all like you? All his  _ Faith’s. _ So fucking close to becoming- Nevermind. Nevermind the answer won't help now." Temperance relaxes while she contemplates. Her first mistake.

Faith grabs a jar, marked:  _ no,  _ and throws it at the ground. It shatters and a powder so thick they both choke fills the air. The air blooms a sickening red and blue, warning signs on a wounded animal ready to give everything in a final stand. 

Faith skitters in her vision: her own fear palpable and bleeding the edges of reality. The Bliss doesn’t work on her, not until it’s so thick on the tongue you have to swallow. Faith is constantly at that level of exposure. Being near her is the first time she’s ever really felt it. 

Faith re-solidifies behind her. "How did it happen? Tell me.  _ Tell  _ me. It’s the only thing left I can  _ give  _ him- The only way  _ I  _ get to  _ live _ .”

Temperance answers. "Quickly. One moment I'd been dragging my sister's body up from the summerhouse, where she'd killed herself, the next I was -like this. I'd heard a voice and changed." It was like dominoes: Diligence had died because she'd seen the writing on the wall, her ultimate sacrifice. Molly and her trip to the police thinking she'd had it all solved but still missing most of the pieces. Kindness and her insatiable needs; bloody, wrong and barely her own. She'd heard the Voice first, after all. It ended with Temperance finding an almost dead body and being stupid enough to leave. Failing. "It's not a choice."

"A calling."

"Not that either." Temperance shakes her head. "You won't hear it, Rachel. It's not going to work."

“You don’t  _ know  _ that.” Faith hisses.“I am  _ better  _ than the others.”

Temperance nods. " _ You  _ had Bliss.” 

Because Faith exists, she's made it necessary for other Faith's to one day need to exist. There will never be a second escape hatch, only this one. That’s not Rachel’s fault. That’s not the fault of any Faith that came before her. But that's also the ugly fucking seed of surviving. Maybe they should all just be destroyed instead. 

Temperance sways with it. She feels Faith-Rachel become real. "Rachel." She strikes. Topples them both to the floor and crawls on top of her. Raises her hands to cradle Rachel’s face, curves thumbs near the eyes. "I really will kill you. You know that right?"

"I-"

"I may not understand exactly what made you what you are," she says carefully, "but I understand  _ what  _ you are. Better than most. I don't have the compassion some of my fellow LEO's might muster. I just don't have it in me."

"No?"

"No. At a certain point, coercion becomes compliance. I don't know if I can forgive myself, let alone you." Temperance sits down, lifts her hands, body heavy with the admission. "Maybe Wrath does work. I don't want to be the person who wants to kill you, Faith. But take it as read that I am, as of right now, that person." 

She spits. "Maybe you should try forgiveness."

"Oh, you're only saying that because I might kill you. Tell your Father I  _ will  _ make Jacob understand and he'll have to live with that." She pushes the flat of her palm to Faith’s neck and it feels -wrong, like this isn’t what she’s meant to do when she’s the one on top, so she pushes only enough to make a point, then stands and collects Faith’s papers, ignoring her pleading eyes. "I'll be taking this."

Faith rises to her knees, back bowed and shivering. “He’ll kill me.”

“I will kill you,” Temperance corrects. “That’s the point, right? Joseph’s point?  _ I’m  _ the killer. That’s what makes what you do okay. Find somewhere else to be Rachel.” Pity moves her to place her hand on the other woman’s head. All Faith-Rachel’s nastiness, her twisting of  _ delicate  _ to  _ cruel.  _ To the stealing of minds and souls. Temperance has all the same skills. They’re how you survive in a world that hates what you are. When she pinches a lock of honey-blonde hair in her fingers she thinks of being told she was the reward for virtuous men. “You deserve, at least, my honesty.”

"Why can't you forgive yourself?"

"Because the person who survived wasn't much of a person."  _ Bad Sister, Bad Wife, Bad Daughter. A very fucking efficient killer. _ There’s a beam of light shattering the space between them. Yellow as a buttercup. Must be the Bliss. "Goodbye, Faith." 

\--

To be stuck equidistant from yourself: far from the passive world but hellishly aware of where you are, that you won’t get closer. Awareness but no control. Neither a useful perspective for anything but war. That’s what Jacob has given her. It is hell if this is what he thinks being a soldier is.

They no longer need John. They no longer need Faith. 

They have their information. They have their territory and keys. They’re walking dead. And Temperance...doesn’t want this. Is she compromised? Her dalliances with Joseph almost never involve his siblings. She thinks John is pathetic and that Faith is monstrous. Vice versa too, honestly. But she doesn’t want it. She’s tired. For the first time in a very long time, she’s tired. She sleeps and eats and her small scratches take hours not minutes to heal. This is on the downturn now. She doesn’t want to kill anymore. 

They put it to a vote. The Lawful contingent of Hope County wants to imprison them and hand them over to the authorities. The Pissed Off Rottweiler contingent wants to invent necromancy and run through Marquis de Sade’s whole inventory. Temperance finds herself in the small contingent that just wants everyone to go to their corners _and leave each other alone. _What is Faith-Rachel or John to her? Nothing. Even one more dead, on any side, is too fucking many. And for Temperance, well, she can feel the crescendo building. This is nearly at the end. Virgil, the mayor, hands out the slips and Whitehorse counts them. It takes thirty-eight hours altogether. 

_ This is how the almighty does it, huh?  _ She writes her  _ no  _ vote on the paper provided and declines to name it. _ When you’re so much bigger it feels wrong to hit back. Abdicate it, make the small things hurt each other.  _

The  _ yes  _ vote wins. For the first time, Temperance almost prays to find John first.

She doesn’t get her wish. John and Faith take a trip together. Resistance stops the car and pulls her out screaming. John gets away, makes them bleed for it, and runs straight into Temperance’s square of the sweep. 

He doesn’t see her in the woods, injured and frightened as he is. He dashes for an old bunker only a few people know about -it’s occupant must be a member of the Cult now, go figure. Temperance intercepts the grinning hounds on his tail and sends them on their own tails. Then she takes a long look at the Montana blue sky above and goes below.

It’s mostly storage down here. More basement than bunker. A wooden table, some chairs. An old fridge and broken drawers. There are well-hidden windows letting a thin stream of light in. John is raging, blind and frightened.  _ A kind child,  _ Joseph said, and shit maybe she is compromised.

She coughs. “Ahem.”

John snarls. “I’ll give you a fucking fight.”

“I’m not here to-”

John has a knife, the ridiculous shit. He’s damned good with it too. Temperance takes her cuts deep and clean and keeps blocking. She hits him a few times when he goes for something she doesn’t want to lose, like her ears and eyes and  _ face  _ because he keeps going for the shit that would hurt him. Self-fucking centred even now. Temperance takes the knife, jabs it into her own leg so she can’t lose it and pushes him back to bend over a table. His blue eyes are furious and clear. 

"You wanted to see me, right, without my control, my self. Here it is  _ darling. _ " She grabs his hand and brings it to the knife by her femoral, the knife that isn’t really hurting her. "Sorry I didn't let you hold the knife."

Johns hands skitter. His eyes get that deep desperate thing she remembers from hurting him, the first time, biting into his thin-skinned throat.  _ Inhuman,  _ she thought then,  _ so far beyond broken that the pieces have transformed unintelligibly.  _ Mirror, mirror, John Seed. She knows what that’s like.  _ _

“Is that all it’s worth to you?” Temperance doesn’t laugh at him. Close, but not quite. “Is this all it takes, John? You just want to see a soul, outside of its place? Is that all you think you’re worth? That if you just rip it out, you’ll get back what they took from you?” Her mouth opens of its own volition and the spirit moves through her. “That’s  _ pennies  _ for gold, sweetheart.”

His blue eyes spring wide. 

Behind him, in front of her, the wall is just reflective enough to cast an image. Her eyes are open and gold. The itch in her back has blossomed out, the gossamer of wing filament. Gold, white and dark brown. It looks like streaks in the muddy reflection of the wall but still surely there. Six pairs of wings and open eyes to match. Here there is a light floating down, motes of diamonds between them, encircling her head. Her face is not her face. 

Maybe it’s all the stored furniture, the white refrigerator and the drawers broken open. The crack in the basement window, at head height, obscures it.

“Pennies for nothing.” She licks her lips. His face is wrong, like he’s seeing an angel. Open and wanting, ravenous. “So? Is it worth the price of admission?”

His voice cracks. “What?” 

Her hands ache. Her vision is blurring as her back begins to fold under the phantom weight. “Here.” She removes the hand from his throat and pulls a penny from her pocket. She presses it to his chest, slides her hand down to find the back pocket of his stupid jeans. It means pressing closer and although she doesn’t mean the intimacy, doesn’t  _ know  _ what intimacy actually is at this point, their hearts sync. Rabbit heart, getaway speed. 

“Go home. You’ve lost, just- Go  _ home,  _ John.”

”Tell me where it is.”

She leans back. His arm shoots down to become a bar at her back keeping them flush from the waist down. Rook reaches for mercy, says, “You don’t have enough for the price.”

He laughs, wet. “I have a penny. But I don’t think,” from this close his eyes are shocking, upsetting. He swallows. “I don’t think I’ll be giving this one back, my dear.”

_ That’s the problem,  _ Rook thinks, but he lets her go. Lets her stumble back into the broken white and brown shelves, their gold trim. Lets her shiver at her cold, weightless back, her heavy heart. Just lets her stumble out into the dark night, down one penny. 

\--

She visits his dream when she knows he has gone to hers. She watches The Collapse, all the way to the end. 

\--

She’s walking a bend in the road, hairpin, no sightlines when it comes on the radio. Faith is missing but lamed, she’ll be dead by evening light from  _ injuries incompatible with life _ . John is dead. The Church is mourning. That same morning a message comes from the Whitetails: Jacob blames her. And he’ll be seeing her soon. 

She honestly can’t wait. 

As if he knows that she starts seeing wolves. Huge and white and  _ mean  _ with madness. She doesn’t want this out in the open. She wants it on her terms, as much as one negotiates terms with Jacob  _ Annihilation  _ Seed. She swings by the Ryes, carefully, when they’re at a check-up for Carmina, born just a week ago. She slings herself across Nick Rye’s shoulders, kisses his cheek like she’s his little miss. She presses the same lips to Kim Rye’s laughing mouth twice, and then to baby Carmina’s head. She says goodbye to her good daughter in the same way she said hello driving hell for leather across Montana dirt. That is, saying  _ holy shit you’re gorgeous  _ while her daddy cries over just how true that is. 

She makes her rounds. She says  _ goodbye  _ without the word. Whitehorse picks it, maybe, but he knows her just well enough to realise she’s the kind of heroine that dies before the end. Martyr works better than a survivor, by her own reckoning. He thinks she’s hunting Joseph not feeding herself to Jacob. Grace does make out with her a little, just a little, over the last bottle of champagne in Hope County. The bottle Grace may or may not have kept to drink out of a Seed skull, the scamp.

_ Goodbye. Farewell. Goodnight.  _ She says out loud, alone, before she lets Jacob find her. As has been said:  _ Annihilation.  _ That’s what’s on the table.

It’s just not going to be  _ hers.  _ Jacob took Staci. He took her peace of mind. He took the knowledge that made the dresses and the diets and the ballet and the way she watched Diligence die day by day, by the measure of the boys she could control, he took that and made it borderline meaningless. Men kill girls, but the right good smart girl survives because Eve ate the apple and told them  _ how.  _ Jacob took that from her and put himself in its place. And that would be  _ enough  _ because Jacob is still the sort of man that belongs in the worlds she understands, but for Joseph and John and  _ Faith  _ and how they too opened seals. Equidistant from herself and her understanding of  _ self _ : Perfect for war and nothing else.

She lets the wolves lead her, and thinks of deer.

Because he is terminally himself Jacob’s trap is a rock by the river with himself and a rope weighted heavy with a stone. She spots the music box lying a little distance from his knee. First mistake. Next, she sees him sharpening a knife with long relaxed movements, at ease. Second mistake. He glances up at her from where he’s lounging atop the sun-warm stone. One red eyebrow arches all  _ don’t you know what you’re doing here?  _ That’s not mistake three. Not yet. 

“Good day for a walk?” Temperance’s voice snaps with fury.

“Took you a while.” Jacob places his well-kept knife on the stone, far side of the music box. Order of operations: target, music, knife. Dramatic old man. He eases his elbows to his knees and gives her a long look, still the best that Hope has ever managed.

Temperance angles herself and waits for  _ three.  _ The rope is by his other foot, uninhibited by  _ target, music, knife.  _ Does that make it  _ rope, target, music, knife  _ or  _ target, music, knife, rope _ ? Temperance is never going to find out. Jacob opens his mouth, opens his body to stand away from his weapons. His arrogance pitches higher for a brilliant second and she feels  _ mistake three  _ in her bones. She strikes.

The knife was never a problem. The rope a time waster. The music deadly to her mind, but known. Jacob is counting on her being scared of him because he’s got nearly 100 pounds on her and a few inches of height. Because he hurt her mind while his siblings chipped away at her soul. As if he didn’t take the measure right the first time. 

She gets the rope and flicks it hard at his chest. He stumbles back. She loops it around his throat, tightens and drops her weight. She’s strong. Stronger than him. 

He arches absurdly over the boulder. Feet planted but stretched to put the weight on his shoulders and slow down his suffocation. He reaches for the music box but she slaps his hand and throws it into the river. He reaches for the knife so she picks it up, flips it in the air and slams the blade hilt-deep into the rock. The boulder cracks but takes it. 

Under her knee goes the rope so she can control it better. She eases off to immobilisation without death, then waits for him to catch up. "Do you know how things like me -and your brother, let's not forget Joseph. Do you know how we get made?" She pushes some of the hair off his ruddy face. "It takes a moment. A single moment of absolute despair. For all your scars and talk of weakness you've never even come close. There has to be nothing in the world, in the universe, that loves you. There has to be...nothing. Kind of a surprise, because I would have bet you loved him to the gates of hell and back. Maybe just not that moment, then."

Jacob sneers at her. 

"I do believe you love him," she consoles. "And to my annoyance, it seems mutual. So, you're alone in the universe, just one living thing screaming and getting not even the vibration of your own voice back, and you're so beyond the human capacity for grief that something just has to come down and tap you on the shoulder. You're fucking up the natural order of things."

"Go on." She eases off for a moment in preparation for letting him go. Jacob takes controlled breaths, efficient and merciless as always. "As I was saying. Something comes to you. It's a voice or a hand up or a kiss on the cheek. It comes and you have to say yes. You're alone, scum of the earth and alone. The only word you have is yes: complicated by the fact that all humans want other humans and cannot in some cases  _ deny  _ contact. None the less:  _ yes _ ." She leaps off the rope, curls it into her hands as she dashes clear of him. 

Jacob comes up roaring. He gets his feet and his breath under him, but she’s made him mad. Not sloppy. He’s good when he comes to fight her. She ducks a hard hit and swings the rope into his stomach. Gets to the side and kicks his knee out. All the way out. 

"But you only get one Voice. And it is hard to say no." She continues. "My grandfather said I was  _ born  _ for it. That something  _ shone  _ out of me. A capacity for vengeance or forgiveness. An angel." She sneers, this time. "You only get one Voice and you do not ever get to choose  _ what  _ talks to you."

Jacob gets up again -good god, what a man- but Temperance slides in close for the kill. She kicks the dislocated knee out to the side. Hears the crunch, the fall and wacks him again while he’s down. Jacob rolls in dirt. She fetches his well-kept knife from the boulder, dulled by the experience and contemplates where to drive it in.

Jacob surprises her. He has  _ another  _ knife. He jams it into her stomach, face set to a pyrrhic victory. 

“Jacob.” She pulls the knife out dispassionately. “You cannot kill me in any way that matters.”

His face pales. For a moment Rook  _ has  _ the soldier.

She aims the knife for his throat. A  _ mercy  _ kill because he’d hate that. “I’m sorry you had to see them go first,” Temperance Mercy O’Hare, sister to six sisters, says. “Outliving your siblings is hard.”

But of course, he gets his victory, pyrrhic and all. "What are you even talking about?" Jacob laughs as he dies. "John and Faith lived."

\--

It is  _ his  _ dream. And it is so very, very red. 

Joseph doesn’t know yet about Jacob. Surely he wouldn’t be here if he did. “What were you going to do if you succeded?” 

“Kill some people Joseph. It wasn’t a surprise ending.”

“Even when they carried the same burdens as you. Does no part of you want to see them made whole again? Strong?”

“No. No,” here we go, opening doors she doesn’t need opened. Truths that don’t need saying “you want, no, need to forgive them for their humanity. I...don't.” It is wretched to say. 

“You need to love them.” He insists. “Love them and let it cleanse you. You need to cut away the baggage that brought you here-”

“-so,  _ you _ -”

“-and let yourself be purified.”

“I am pure. That was always the point.” She smiles, this cracked rueful thing that makes her eyes water.“I know that with your own baggage this won’t ever make sense to you,” she drops to a whisper, leans towards him, “but love never stopped anyone from getting hurt.”

She takes his hand. “You can’t choose what saves you.” She means it for the baby. For the wife. For the people in his hell. For the evil spark inside him, that went and smothered any good. You’re saved and damned by what did the deed. “Joseph. Love did not save you. That voice that you hear? It’s not coming from inside your head, but it’s also not coming to save you. I am coming to save you. From yourself, and the burden you place on others, the Bliss and your upsetting idea of god. So when I come for the last piece of this puzzle I need you to be thinking about something: it wasn’t god in the room with you that day and  _ that,  _ not god, is why I am here right now.” 

She steps out of the dream. 

\--

They get mad. 

Wrathful, even. 

Temperance is back to Rook, what with running off to kill Jacob in the woods. Great that Jacob's dead, she shouldn't have lied. Nick cries when he sees her. Sharky is worse. Rook can still make grown men act like babies, good for her. 

Staci Pratt walks into the prison ten days after she kills Jacob Seed, sheets of paper in hand. He says  _ Hello from the Whitetails, Eli is having a fuck of a time learning sign language,  _ makes himself a sandwich and waits til the news hits someone who might recognise him. Rook is not there, still sorely nursing those old hopes of a happy home and a few bratty kids, but she hears from Kim. The Rye doing the hard work of forgiving her. 

“That’s great.” To her own ears Rook’s voice is dull and panicky, somehow.

“Are you going to see him?” Kim asks flat out.

“I hope- I don’t know.” She wets her lips. “He killed something inside him.”

“You killed him, Rook. Jacob is dead.”

_ No,  _ she thinks ruefully,  _ Jacob turned Staci inside out, then Staci went and killed the thing that made me love him.  _ He used to want a partner in crime, not an ingenue he could lead around. Now he’s too much like Jacob, too much like the man who made Temperance scared of herself. The one situation where love did not in fact conquer all.  She knows men like that, like Staci. 

Rook doesn’t get the space she wants. Whitehorse calls all the Resistance leaders down to a meeting and given her title as Only Successful Seed Kill, that means her. All the territories are safe for now. All the Peggies heading into the bunkers early or to Joseph for safety.  _ He’s  _ been busy. New Bliss exits the ground red and blue on his borders. It sends people barreling towards insanity with no return ticket. She and Lindsey are cranking out their best guesses at deterrents but so far burning it back is the only recourse. That takes care of the flowers but leaves the thorny bushy heart-plant, bleeding horrid dark sap from their wounds. The bush-Bliss grows tall and desperate around Peggie heartland.

It’s cold and it’s dark when Rook pulls into the Spread Eagle. Cold enough that her breath snaps in front of her and her hands tingle pink at the tips. Cold enough to put a scarf around her neck. She’s near last to enter and casual habit has her taking the temperature of the room. Those who know her hate her, or don’t understand her choices. Her distance, her silence, her killing Jacob but not celebrating. Some, like Grace, have patience for her wayward antics and her disinclination to hunt Joseph in his undisputed kingdom. After all, she killed Jacob, the hardest son of a bitch out there. Most of the rest know that last fact and treat her accordingly. 

And some, she notes with dark humour, still have confederate flags and 1488 tattooed on their arms like it still means something. God Bless how it takes all types or something like that. 

Rook climbs on top some stacked boxes. She sees Nick, Joey, Jerome, Whitehorse, Virgil, Mary May,  _ Staci _ and Grace at the front with an old television. They’re talking as she’s looking at them. Saying things that matter less than what she’s seeing.

Picture: A man among the white flowers, head bowed, yellow over the eyes. Around him are people on their knees _ not  _ like the churches these people know. Women, primarily, in a circle. White dresses, precious stones and metal too rich for the man speaking hanging from their necks. Grass stains wind up from their bodies press in the dirt. Sweat pools in the hollows of their bodies. They’ve been there for hours, Rook knows because Sunday service at Virtue didn’t end until you thought it might kill you. The pretty girls, who know how to pray for it, if you follow their scrubbed and moistened mouths you hear it:  _ and by all these Virtues, hold me still, in the arms of the Holy. _

_ Fuck Joseph Seed.  _

“-even now I still love you. I will save you.” Joseph says as Temperance yo-yo’s through years and years of trauma. “We  _ will  _ walk through the Gates together.”

She realises with a dim horror that he means it. He loves them. 

“Come and be saved, May Merciful Temperance Come Upon You,” Joseph says to the camera, the crowd.

Grace snorts. So do the others. Not Rook. All the rest, the dreams and the taunts, have been warning shots. Rook feels it burn up her insides, turn her ice water hot for a blooming second before her own will freezes it down again. Joseph leisurely makes eye contact with everyone while Rook pulls on her given name for some fucking patience. 

His eyes hit her. She bites down her  _ wrath  _ and goes with the first thing that comes to mind. “You’d better hope she doesn’t.”

“This instructional video,” Whitehorse says in an extremely rare moment of mirth, “comes with an ultimatum.” 

She waits for it, yearns for it.

“Surrender, or he’ll take you by force.” Whitehorse’s face is dead serious, even with the jeers and boos echoing the room. “May Merciful Temperance Come Upon You, surrender, and all else will be saved.”

\--

It’s lucky these people don’t know her, Temperance finally decides. She came here not so many years ago determined to be the un-strange thing. She got sleepless nights in a blue-green valley. Got to be the charming new girl, got to be the girl cussing out the same assholes at the bar every month, got to go on a bridesmaids fishing trip. Temperance got time in the wide world to figure out she wanted to have babies in a small town that would always call her  _ Rook  _ first. She got time. That’s more than some ever get.

Whitehorse slides her an ice-cold beer. “Sharky got the machine working again.”

“Of course he did.”

“So.” Whitehorse leans next to her stretch of wall. “That was about you.”

“Yep.”

“This new Bliss is dangerous. Everyone’s all but inoculated to the old stuff. Whatever Faith...”

“Yeah,” Rook says, “I know.” 

“You’re going to go?” He makes it conversational but this isn’t a conversation. He’s telling her to end it, again. End it like she did Jacob. He’d already accepted that she won’t be coming back. Rook drinks her beer and looks away. Around the room filled with people who don’t understand what that ultimatum was.

Staci’s eyes glimmer wolf-bright when they meet hers. Jacob must have told him her full name.

Rook downs her last beer. She feels a little bit of her heart break off at the steel in Whitehorse’s eyes, but she does the right thing. “In the morning. First light.” 

That’s good enough for him. She almost opens her mouth and asks if they’d had longer, would they have been close enough for him to be sad about asking her to go out and die for them? Sure,  _ Temperance  _ always knew this was an option but when did it become one for him?

A scarred hand passes her a drink. Staci Pratt leans his borderline emaciated body down on to his knees next to her stretch of wall. His hair is long and shiny, tied up on his head. His beard is short and clean. His clothes are worn but neat and beyond reproach. He looks like a bit of a Peggie, honestly. He’s telegraphing himself as clean and harmless but there’s something manic in the way he no longer blinks or startles. No acting up anymore for Staci Pratt. 

“Shit of a thing to ask.” His voice is permanently deeper now, breathy. “Sorry Rook.”

Not  _ Don’t go, Rook.  _ “Where did you go?” She remembers thinking he broke wrong. That Jacob left behind too many pieces. 

“Somewhere else.” Staci’s eyes go flat like a night river. There is something in them still alive and reflecting moonlight that scares her somewhere primal. “Somewhere bad. You know anything about that?”

She looks at him, his elbows pressed against his knees and his hair tied back. They’ve been here in this bar before and stood just like this. Temperance used to want him to pay attention to her, now she’d do nearly anything to make him go away. His nostrils flare. She thinks of her grandfather's cane hitting the ground. Staci’s mouth twists. He belongs in that room with Rufus O’Hare.  _ What do you do when a man like that pays attention to you?  _ You run. 

“No.” She swallows and lets the alcohol hurt her all the way down. “I wouldn’t know a thing.”

\--

She sleeps. Therefore dreams. 

She's pretty sure they've never fucked. Thank god. She's dead certain he's the kind of messy, hurtful, too passionate thing that makes idiots fall in love instead of buying a vibrator and some Xanax. The kind of thing that gives you three orgasms to make a point not to, like, have fun and share something. Too much of a sure thing. 

She has, most annoying of all, visions of an other, other life with a little bookstore she curates, a room upstairs for Joseph's Bible studies or the killer outreach program they could've run with their combined skill sets. Arguments over cups of tea and that obsession with textiles they both have covering the walls and the floor. Her bent out of shape siblings and his, in a place where generational trauma didn't have to hurt. A child. A girl. Her name would be Joy. 

She’s been cycling through her first dream-memories of him. Of the sunburnt field, she saw him in at the beginning when he gave her shade and his prayers over her. Made the memory bearable with his company. To form she’s in a modest high-necked dress. The ruby jewelled necklace she always lost resting cold against her hot skin. He’s reading a book under a tree. His book. She strolls to him, dress lifted to expose the length of her thighs. “You bellowed?”

He sighs, fingers pinching his nose like she's an errant child. "You understand too much. You can't forgive anything." He puts down the book and lets his posture go easy and open. "I am willing to love you as long as it takes for you to learn forgiveness," he threatens. "I am willing to admit that I don't particularly intend for there to be a choice."

She thinks of  _ Joy  _ who will never exist but might have if that hadn't been a threat. Willing to love her until she forgave herself, that could have been  _ perfect.  _ "And I," her mouth twists as she sits next to him in the grass, "will make you be honest, until you learn how to be kind, until you actually are the person you disguise yourself as." Insect noises, the smell of sunlight, it all becomes hyperreal between them. "Or destroy you. Not giving you an out either."

She’s felt the ending coming. Now it feels like they’re on the same wavelength.

"Are you trying to make them like us? All of them?" She shifts closer to him, into the shade and rest her head on the tree near his shoulder. He smells like a man. Sweaty, dirt-covered and green. The worst person to play Adam and Eve with."Empty them out so when  _ it  _ comes for them they have to be like you?"

"I don't know." He picks at the grass between them. Unsubtly tilts them together. "I hope the divine might touch them so they have the certainty that we do. The clarity. But it doesn't always work."1

"You find this  _ clear, _ huh?" She laughs. "I don't. I think I'm just wasting time. My time. Theirs. Who knows."

"You have a calling."

"I  _ had  _ a sister. It happened to her too but she came out different. I have no idea why it picked me.” She turns to him, pleading. “You have to stop. You're not going to break them right. They're not going to wake up like us."

"You've seen the end. You  _ know  _ what's coming."

"No, I don't. I already told you," she places a gentle hand on his chest, feels it rise and fall, "I'm here for you."

He kisses her. 

It feels blue-green, and with that, he’s taken everything from her. His hands shade her face. Her hands reach for a heartbeat that’s sure under the touch. She begins to weep and laugh, to press small kisses so she has time to breathe in between breaking again. It doesn’t matter how alone she feels, now, he loves her and she’ll never be alone enough to hear the Voice again. Blue-green, the last thing left inside Merciful Temperance to take. 

Her tears burn his face clean and clear. 

Temperance touches her mouth to his forehead, traces the planes of his face with her lips until she can hover just a touch above his lips. “Thanks for the antidote.” Blue-green. Yellow-Yellow. Red. She bites his lips hard enough to bleed and lo-and-behold the white flowers that bloom. 

She walks into the Bliss.

\--

She wakes up with a handful of hours before her self-imposed exile. Her chest hurts in a way it never has before. She gets up. She gets dressed. She gets on with it.

Forty minutes before first light she finds dear Doctor Lindsey and hands him a small vial of water. “Here.” She shakes it and slants of golden light flicker in reflection. “The missing ingredient.”

“What is it?” 

“A,” few hours spent watching  _ Marley and Me, _ “strange distillation of water. That’s my best guess with the equipment we have.” 

He squints at it and at her. “Have you been crying?”

Temperance doesn’t smile. She shrugs. “Some things just make you sad.”

\--

She steps out, sure of purpose, as the first tremors go across the earth. A false launch: Asia to America, a surprise rippling across the airwaves that zing past Hope County without touching down. Threats made by governments are being met. A missile in a barely strung together nuclear armament some hours from Hope twists in its home and alters course. It will land near its home with a broken fin and no one will ever figure it out until it's safe and unfindable. Right now, as Temperance throws herself into her own car, the one with the Essential Rock and the last Jo Malone stocking stuffer in a hundred miles, it’s touch and go on whether or not that last missile will go off. The world will end today but what happens in Hope County, Montana is still up for grabs.

Temperance doesn’t know this entirely. She knows that The Collapse is biting her fucking ankles. She can hear Kindness begging her not to leave her alone with the knowledge. To set her free to wreak whatever horrors she thought might prevent it, or call it down faster. But she doesn’t know that it’s  _ now _ .

She drives her car down a stretch of road that curves the river, all of it burnt and dug out to make room for a waystation flying an unspoiled American flag. It was Peggie country before. Resistance retribution now. The land is unstable. The road falling away at the edges. It takes smarts to know where she can put her wheels. It used to be nice here: a little series of farms wet and damp with mushrooms and cotton and other things that need tending so they don’t spoil. Her now burnt-out house stood near enough to the couple that lived there that she felt comfortable walking forty-five minutes to see them. To trade, the expensive organic cultures Chastity had sent her from a  _ Goop!  _ showroom for fresh apples, crisp as snow on the inside. She used to wake up craving them, something in dirt-ness of them spoke to her, in the near glittering white flesh. She knows now it was the blood in the dirt doing the speaking.

The air gets funny for a second, she gets hot and itchy in her eyes like she’s about to cry. Her head aches, that pain resonating down to build between her shoulder blades. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a slim-legged animal jump to get in front of her car. It’s grey and soft furred, there are flowers growing out of its ears and it has giant milky eyes bloated to the size of fists- 

A herd of deer appear. 

She rolls to a stop. Tilts her head to shake off the sweet Bliss. “You have got to be shitting me.” The woods are thick with Bliss both new and old. Whatever the deer are now Temperance wants no part of. She reverses and makes to go around- 

Her car hits loose dirt and freefalls down a small cliff. The car tumbles and turns and Temperance, who wouldn’t usually worry, feels blood split open across her mouth. The airbag winds her and the guitars of AC/DC spoil and turn to static. The car tumbles over twice more, once again after that, and she feels her ribs pierce the skin. That’s too far for her angel-blood, too much damage to get the job done, so it slides back inside her and stitches up the skin after. Temperance arm flops away from her broken like marbles. Her knee is away and torn open. She hurts. She hurts so fucking much she wishes she _could_ die. 

But she isn’t a martyr. She’s a survivor, guaranteed against her will by fate and fortune. Until she confronts her partner in this madness, until she does whatever she didn’t do for her sister -if it’s to stop the Collapse or whatever else, she’s on call. Temperance bites down on her own pain and claws her way out.

“Shit!” She lands on her marble-arm. The radio kicks back in - _ seek shelter! Seek shelter! This is not a drill!-  _ and she makes it shut up by ramming her skull straight through what remains of the windscreen to get out. Her skin splits, hair comes off like candle-wax on fingers, but she gets through. The radio gets louder, worse - _ pray for us, my god, we will need it-  _ but it pales next to the pain of her body falling apart.

A hand grips her hair at the back, near the broken-fried roots. Temperance vomits right across her split lip. Coughs and gurgles through her tearing throat.

“You are going to  _ tell me  _ how to make it  _ happen _ .” Rachel-Faith snarls. “One of you  _ will  _ tell me. I will  _ make you.  _ No matter what I have to do to you.” 

She’s strong for such a tiny thing. Strong to go with the fragile/delicate balance she chose from the pile of weaponised bullshit feminine wiles. She drags her half a foot before the whiteout pain turns sharp. Before she feels wings begin to pull out of her skin. Temperance holds onto that pain and lets it drag into healing. Her marble arm pulls all of its shards back together.

She hisses. “Fuck off Rachel.”

Rachel snarls and picks something up. Stone. A heavy blunt weapon. 

“You’re missing the obvious.” Temperance pulls herself up. “Someone out there still loves you.” She rolls onto her knees in a horrid little reenactment of their last encounter, except Temperance doesn’t cry and Rachel has too much riding on this. “You can go back. You can’t come back from this. But you can come back from  _ here _ if someone still loves you.”

“I’d rather be invincible.”

Alright. Temperance can hand that one to her. 

_ -can anyone hear me! A fucking nuke is heading for- _

"You're going to kill me." Rachel Jessop's mad eyes flash.

True enough. Temperance did say that. Meant it, too.

- _ can anyone  _ hear me  _ it’s the end of the fucking  _ world _ - _

Faith bounces from foot to foot, dress fluttering. Her weapon swings up and up over her head. “I’m going to kill you first.”

_ Fucking deer,  _ Temperance thinks, before Rachel smashes her head in with a rock. 

\--

This is not a dream. Rachel made a mosaic out of her fucking skull. She knows that. But still she goes away and sees herself in white in a great field of flowers blue-green. That woman raises a hand to her heart and mimes it breaking. She holds her hand to her head and mimes it exploding. She holds her hand to her belly, lets it fill with light but instead of leaving it stays and lights her up from the inside out. A thing she has kept. 

\--

Of course Faith is the one to put her in the ground. 

She awakes from her not-a-dream on a double bed. Prepper bunker chic woollen blankets are under her mostly healed cheek. Her skin feels fragile and new, scarred. Her skull is no longer all over the ground but she feels as if someone pieced it together by hand. Her eyes ache when she tries to hold them open too long. It’s well-stocked with food lining the walls and an industrial water tank and it’s filters stacked knee-high. The lights keep flickering on and off above her. There is a stain folding out from a cupboard that she doesn’t want answers to. Signs of aggression on the floor. She sits up and takes a better look. There are restraints at the corners of the bed, books on a crate turned book table. Mostly bibles. She sees black paint writing on the wall:  _ WE ARE MADE ANGELS.  _ The writing is familiar, Rachel’s. 

Had she made this place for herself? Why? 

A door is open somewhere. She can smell fire and blood. Okay. Get up. Get out. She pushes to her feet. 

“You’re awake.” A familiar voice says. “I wasn’t sure...”

Joseph is here with her. His arms are bare to his rolled-up sleeves and wet with blood and body-matter. The radio in the corner spits out news:  _ War! War! Everyone has fired their nukes! EVERYONE HAS FIRED THEIR NUKES!  _ The Collapse is well underway. 

He stands at a basin and washes his hands, wipes down his forearms. She doesn’t even pretend she’s not attracted to the motion. After a moment, he asks, “What did you do to her? To make her bring us here?”

"Told her I'd kill her." He’s drying his hands now, she keeps watching. “What did you do?”

He doesn’t answer immediately. “Faith will not be returning,” he says quietly. Outside the held open door the screaming has commenced. The rioting. The looting. They’re both breathing calmly and evenly at the end of days. "John died last night. A fever we could not treat."

She bled the mountains of medicine. She can only imagine it got worse when Jacob died. "I'm sorry," Temperance says, "I know how hard that is." 

He looks at her from behind yellow lenses as he comes to some decision. “One last choice.” He strides over to the bed and folds down on to it. “Go, I will not stop you.” He closes his eyes and crosses his long legs at the ankles, folds his arms so he’s comfortable. “It is, however, on a timer. Two minutes.”

“Only because it can’t kill me.” She shakes her head. “What do you  _ want _ , Joseph?”

“To be right.” One blue eye opens. “And you, Merciful Temperance. To be right and to be blessed enough to see the world end, as He intended.”

The world is out there. Nick and Kim and Carmina and Grace and Sharky and Joey and- The whole world. Her living sisters. Her living husband. She stands up and squares herself. Her head shakes on its axis, makes her want to sit down. Sit down and cry. She takes a step. And then another. Then one more. She feels run through, beaten up, like there’s something missing. She looks over her shoulder at the man there. Her back itches. 

Temperance sinks down on the bed. 

The door shuts.

“I do have dreams.” He says quietly. “You’ve been in them. I’ve never figured out why you couldn’t see them.”

Temperance looks at her hands. She weeps. 

“We’re in this together.” The Father says. “All we have is each other.”

“For now.” May Merciful Temperance Come Upon You replies. Alright, for the last time:  _ smile.  _ “But I have thirty-four years on this earth that say this is my soul to keep, give it your best shot.”

The lights flicker, then go out. 

\--

_ this is gonna be my dying song _

_ so, what the hell, i'll sing it loud and long _

_ thanks to all the songs that i have sung _

_ but this is the last before i'm wrung and hung _

_ this is gonna be my dying song _

_ thanks to the life that i have lived and loved _

_ i'll see you soon after evil hath won _

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...if this feels like sequel bait that's because there's a sequel. I realised in about chapter three, when John ruined my outline by being just compelling enough to not delete, that I wasn't going to get where I wanted to go. This is honestly like eighty five percent of the outline which is great for a first draft but less than I usually accept for a posted work. That's fine, it happens, and I didn't want to take the whole story down to rewrite it. So, second part, to get us to where were originally going: 
> 
> blood in water
> 
> Five months after the end Temperance is searching for safe harbour in the new world. She disappeared into a hole in the ground, along with Joseph Seed, leaving the Resistance and the Cult in disarray. There are people in the woods no one knows, people who should be dead alive again and alliances that seem impossible.  
More than anything Temperance needs distance between her and Joseph and nothing says distance like Dutch's Island but everyone seems to think she has the answer to another impossible riddle, one that dates all the way back to a murder in a river they didn't solve and possibly even further back to Temperance's own bloodied past.

**Author's Note:**

> All Jacob actually said was that she seemed a little tougher than Staci, which was not, in his opinion, hard. Joseph just decided to make it weird.
> 
> I'm going to try and update once a week all the way through each universe, so see you next Monday!


End file.
